Thursday, April 12, 2007

BCCI's restriction on endorsements

Couple of points:

1. BCCI is well within its rights to impose these conditions on players who wish to play for them. I have seen people (including some business leaders) question bcci's right to do so, have called it violation of players' rights etc. which is utter nonsense. Playing for bcci is not a right guaranteed by constitution. If you want to play for them, you abide by their conditions, as simple as that.

2. As for whether it makes sense - I don't agree with the stated reason (spending too much time on shooting ads etc) but there are other grounds for justifying the decision. There is no doubt that endorsements do not reward all performances equally. Batsmen who do well in one-dayers end up with bulk of endorsement deals whereas bowlers and Test batsmen (Laxman vs Yuvraj/Dhoni for example) don't get as much. This can lead to and has in the past led to frictions within the team. If bcci doesn't want to create such differential rewards, if for them harmony within the team is important, then it makes sense for them to impose restrictions on endorsements. There was a similar case in my previous company when a customer wanted to reward some of the team members, but the company didn't allow it - they said we have our own performance management and incentive schemes, we don't want you to meddle around with it.

3. In any case, I have always argued that boards are more powerful than players in the current system and I am just happy to see the players get screwed :-) If this leads the players to go play for a parallel league, as a consumer, it will be better for me.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mohan,

Have you ever wondered why a fabulous actor like Atul Kulkarni earns far far lesser than an Aamir Khan although he is as good if not a better actor ?

Using the same analogy, the Yuvrajs score over the VVSs despite the latter having better credentials.

Oh and you must know surely that some persons actually choose not to do ads - the All England Champ P Gopichand chose to decline an endorsement of Pepsi because he didnt beleive in the product.

How do you know that VVS doesnt have similar qualms ?

Why even SRT refuses to so an alcohol or ciggy ad while Bhajji and company have no issues with it.

Ila.

Mohan said...

Ila, I understand that market doesn't always reward based on "ability" (Atul Kulkarni vs Aamir Khan). But the point is, if BCCI doesn't want the market to determine the earnings of their players, if they don't want any discrimination between Test stars and one-day stars, if for them team harmony is more important than their players maximizing their earnings, then it makes sense for them to not allow endorsements by their players.

Anonymous said...

i am not at all surprised by your comment on bcci can / should control the endorsements.

but what i was surprised was that you seem to agree that they have done the right thing. while you think players are getting screwed, even bcci is getting screwed in the process....

endorsement or the sponsors (pepsis of the world) were ensuring performance of players, either by fixing it or by motivating the players to perform so that they continue to get business from pepsi.

bcci has failed to exploit that. now bcci will have to take a hit on the bottom line to spend money on players to keep them motivated.

situation in the companies would be slightly different as its not consistent across customers. the whole outsourcing principle there is to get rid of people management, including rewarding performers. so that should not be compared to this situation. here its the common framework used by the sponsors - they choose their brand ambassadors based on the crowd's preceived performance.

to me it does not make business sense from bcci's perspective.