Blitz India Business
NEW DELHI: Food and social media. These are the two routes that the organisers of Wimbledon this year took to woo the Indian audience.
According to a BBC report, in order to crack cricket-obsessed India, Wimbledon had to abandon some of its trademark restraint to win over audiences in a country where tennis remains a niche sport.
India is seeing a stronger pipeline of young talent across both ATP and ITF circuits than it has in nearly a decade, and premium urban sports consumption is expanding rapidly beyond cricket, with streaming platforms able to target niche audiences at scale.
Strawberries and cream got an Indian makeover after Wimbledon partnered with a historic Delhi kulfi (Indian ice cream) maker. Its Instagram channel shared reels of Roger Federer and other stars gliding across the court to popular 1990s Bollywood hits. The championships also welcomed celebrity cricketers and Indian influencers to the Royal Box, using their star power to broaden its appeal.
Wimbledon also hyper-localised its marketing effort with digital content scattered across various Indian languages.
The effort seems to have paid off. Average 8,53,000 viewers tuned in to watch the tournament in India this year – up 18 per cent over last – according to local media. JioStar – the platform which holds exclusive streaming rights for the matches – declined to share official data with the BBC.
Wimbledon’s push to win India is strategic and not accidental, Darshana Bhalla, a sports branding expert told the BBC. India is already Wimbledon’s largest international audience by reach, and this year was a particularly important year with Arnav Paparkar becoming the first Indian in 36 years to reach the under-18 boys singles quarter finals.
“India is also seeing a stronger pipeline of young talent across both ATP and ITF circuits than it has in nearly a decade, and premium urban sports consumption is expanding rapidly beyond cricket, with streaming platforms able to target niche audiences at scale,” says Bhalla.
The organisers of the game capitalised on these shifts. Sally Bolton, chief executive of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, Wimbledon’s governing body, earlier told the Financial Times, that India has joined the US as a “main focus” for growing the grand slam’s audience.
But with the country likely to become the world’s most important growth market for sport in the coming years – the sector is estimated to grow at a compounded 12-14 per cent rate to 2030, nearly double the global average according to KPMG – tournaments like Wimbledon are having to be more culturally specific in the way they engage Indian audiences.
“Wimbledon has understood one of the biggest shifts in global marketing. For decades, premium brands believed exclusivity came from distance. However, today they understand that exclusivity comes from belonging,” says Bhalla.
“What they’ve changed is the entry point, instead of asking young Indians to first understand Wimbledon…they are allowing Indians to discover Wimbledon through familiar cultural cues. Like the kulfi collaboration, Punjabi, Bollywood and Tamil music infusion and Indian creators.”
This, she says, is not just tactical social media engagement, but the creation of a cultural bridge for a vast potential audience currently focused on cricket.
For many younger Indians to whom Wimbledon can feel aspirational but also distant, “reducing this cultural distance” is important, Upasna Dash, founder of the Jajabor Brand Consultancy, told the BBC.
For streaming platforms like JioStar too, the tournament offers a chance to broaden engagement with a new demographic, create calendar events and move away from focusing on a single sport.
It has been widely reported that JioStar was seeking to renegotiate its $3bn broadcast rights contract with the International Cricket Council for 2024-2027 due to financial losses.
The partnership still remains in force, but in such a scenario of uncertainty, increasing investment in tennis makes strategic sense, say experts.
Yet, for all the awareness the branding blitz has created around the tournament to convert to sustained, long term engagement with the sport, Wimbledon will have to “create lasting relevance long after the tournament ends”, according to Aryan Anurag, co-founder, Binge Labs, a Delhi-based social media agency.
For the curiosity to translate into genuine fandom, there will have to be more grassroots engagement and continued market investment, adds Dash.
But for now, every major global sports property is watching Wimbledon’s experiment, says Bhalla.
“If it demonstrates that culturally contextualised storytelling can materially increase engagement in India, then expect F-1, the NBA, the NFL, the UFC, La Liga and the Premier League to deepen their India-first content strategies.”