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I’ve been buying sports media in India for over 30 years. In that time, I’ve watched brands go from being completely unknown to becoming household names — not because they had the biggest advertising budgets, but because they made the right sports sponsorship decision at the right moment.
Sports sponsorship is one of the most misunderstood tools in a marketer’s arsenal. Most brands approach it as a visibility play — get your logo on a jersey, flash it during a broadcast, job done. But that’s only the surface. When done with intention and strategic thinking, sports sponsorship doesn’t just increase awareness. It fundamentally changes how people feel about your brand.
That shift in feeling — from recognition to trust, from familiarity to preference — is what transforms a brand’s market position. And in a country like India, where cricket isn’t just a sport but a shared national emotion, the opportunity is extraordinary.
What Brand Perception Actually Means
Before we get into sponsorship strategy, it’s worth being precise about what we mean by brand perception.
Perception is not what you say about yourself. It’s what consumers believe about you without being prompted. It lives in the space between your advertising and their lived experience of your category. It’s the reason someone walks into a store and reaches for one product over another without consciously thinking about why.
Perception is built slowly, through repeated exposure, emotional association, and social proof. It’s also remarkably difficult to shift once it’s set — which is why getting it right early, or finding the right catalyst to change it, matters so much.
Sports sponsorship, when executed well, is one of the fastest and most cost-effective catalysts available to a brand in India today.
Why Sports Works Differently Than Conventional Advertising
Conventional advertising interrupts. Sports sponsorship integrates.
When someone watches a TVC, there’s an implicit understanding that a brand is trying to sell them something. Their guard is up, even if only slightly. But when that same person is watching their favourite cricket team and sees a brand woven into the experience — on the jersey, in the studio show, during the commentary break — something different happens. The brand borrows the emotional state the viewer is already in.
Cricket in India produces some of the highest emotional engagement of any media content. Joy, tension, pride, community — these are powerful states for a brand to be associated with. And unlike a 30-second spot that’s forgotten by the next ad break, a well-integrated sports sponsorship stays in the frame for the entire broadcast.
This is the psychology behind why sports sponsorship works. It’s not just reach — it’s reach in the right emotional context.
The Indian Market: Why Cricket Is a Category of Its Own
India is not like other markets. You cannot simply apply global sponsorship thinking here and expect the same results.
Cricket in India commands an almost religious following. The IPL alone draws viewership numbers that dwarf most global sporting events. But what’s more important than the scale is the depth — cricket here connects across age, income, language, and geography in a way that no other media property can claim.
In my experience working with brands across two decades of cricket sponsorships, the brands that benefit most are those that go beyond logo placement. The real value is in integration — studio shows, player associations, branded content, moment marketing during live matches. These formats create genuine memory structures, not just impressions.
We were among the earliest agencies in India to explore non-live cricket for brand building — studio shows, analysis programmes, and cricket content outside the live match window. At the time it was an unconventional idea. Today it’s a recognised and competitive media category. That early thinking shaped how many of our clients built their brand equity through cricket, and it’s a philosophy we still apply.
Real Ways Sponsorship Shifts Perception
Let me give you a practical sense of how this actually plays out.
From regional to national. A brand with strong regional recall but limited national presence can use a cricket sponsorship — particularly IPL or national team association — to compress years of brand-building into a single season. The sheer scale of viewership creates a sense of ubiquity that’s very difficult to manufacture through conventional media alone.
From functional to aspirational. Some product categories struggle to build emotional resonance through product advertising alone. A water purifier, for example, is a considered, functional purchase. But when that brand is associated with cricket — with the energy, passion, and aspiration of the sport — it acquires emotional layers that product advertising simply cannot deliver. Kent RO is a brand we worked with closely on sports sponsorship, and their journey from a functional product to a brand with genuine consumer warmth is a good example of this transformation.
From unfamiliar to trusted. For brands entering India for the first time, or challenger brands trying to break into established categories, cricket sponsorship provides instant credibility. Indian consumers extend a degree of trust to brands they see associated with cricket that takes years to build through other channels. The implicit endorsement of the sport carries real weight.
From forgotten to front of mind. Category salience — being the first brand that comes to mind when a consumer thinks of your category — is enormously valuable and notoriously hard to build. Sustained sports sponsorship, particularly through cricket, drives salience in a way that periodic campaign bursts cannot.
What Most Brands Get Wrong
Despite its power, sports sponsorship is frequently misused. Here are the most common mistakes I see brands make.
Treating it as a one-year experiment. Brand perception doesn’t shift in a single season. The brands that have genuinely transformed their image through cricket — Luminous, Relaxo, Kent RO — did so through sustained, multi-year association. Consistency builds memory structures. A single season builds impressions, nothing more.
Paying for visibility without a plan for activation. Buying logo space on a jersey without a plan for how to activate that association across your other media — digital, retail, PR — is a significant waste. The sponsorship should be the centrepiece of a broader campaign, not a standalone line item.
Choosing the wrong property for the brand. Not every cricket property is right for every brand. The IPL reaches a premium, urban, younger audience. Domestic cricket and regional leagues reach different and often more mass-market demographics. Understanding where your consumer lives within the cricket ecosystem matters as much as the decision to sponsor at all.
Ignoring the creative. The quality of your in-stadium or on-screen creative directly affects how much value you extract from a sponsorship. A poorly designed jersey logo or a generic studio show presence wastes the emotional context that sports creates. The creative should be as considered as the placement itself.
How to Evaluate a Sports Sponsorship Opportunity
If you’re considering a sports sponsorship for your brand, here are the questions worth asking before you commit.
First, is this the right sport and property for your target audience? Reach numbers alone don’t answer this — you need to understand the viewer profile, their relationship with the sport, and whether your brand’s values align with what the sport represents.
Second, what is the activation plan? The sponsorship fee is only part of the investment. Budget for creative, digital amplification, PR, and retail integration or the sponsorship will underdeliver.
Third, can you commit for at least two to three years? If the answer is no, it may be worth reconsidering whether a large sports sponsorship is the right vehicle at this moment, and whether a more targeted digital campaign might serve your objectives better in the short term.
Fourth, what does success look like and how will you measure it? Brand perception shifts are measurable — through brand tracking studies, share of search, social sentiment analysis, and consumer surveys. Define your metrics upfront so you’re evaluating the sponsorship fairly.
The Bottom Line
Sports sponsorship is not a logo play. It’s a brand transformation tool — one of the most powerful available in the Indian market when used with strategic intent, creative quality, and long-term commitment.
The brands I’ve seen transform their perception through cricket and sports didn’t do it by accident. They made deliberate choices about which properties to associate with, how to activate those associations, and how to sustain them over time. The result, in every case, was a brand that consumers felt differently about — and that feeling translated directly into preference, loyalty, and growth.
If you’re thinking about how sports sponsorship fits into your brand’s media strategy, we’d be happy to have that conversation. It’s one we’ve been having with India’s leading brands for three decades.
Alliance Advertising & Marketing has been one of India’s leading media and sports marketing agencies for over 30 years. We have managed sports sponsorships for brands including Kent RO, Luminous, Relaxo, Vivo, and Nikon, and are among the largest cricket media buyers in the country. Get in touch to discuss your brand’s sponsorship strategy.