Sometimes, when an organization decides to sponsor a significant occasion, it’s seeking to construct consciousness with a broad cross-section of customers for its merchandise. So when TCS, the tech providers unit of Tata Group, a big Indian conglomerate, that’s hardly a family title within the U.S., first introduced it will be the title sponsor of the New York Metropolis marathon in 2013, it was a little bit of a head scratcher.
In spite of everything, TCS sells its providers to companies, not particular person customers and it’s not within the working enterprise. However on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the primary race in that sponsorship, which has since been renewed via 2029, TCS’ chief advertising officer Abhinav Kumar says it has been a large success. “It’s a phenomenal, phenomenal event for engagement,” Kumar tells Fortune in an interview over Zoom, talking from his workplace in Brussels. Kumar cites a statistic from an outfit referred to as Model Finance, saying that TCS’ model is now price $19.2 billion, up nearly ninefold from 2010, thanks largely to rising consciousness of the title.
When TCS introduced the sponsorship with the New York Metropolis marathon organizer, New York Street Runners, it was already the sponsor of a race in Mumbai, the place it’s headquartered, and the Amsterdam marathon. However it was additionally sponsoring occasions in different sports activities like cricket, and TCS realized it will be higher off concentrating its efforts in a single sport. (It nonetheless sponsors an F1 occasion however in any other case, it’s highway races.)
Since touchdown New York’s marathon, TCS, which spends $40 million a yr on sports activities sponsorships, has picked up the London and Toronto marathons, with Sydney, Australia just lately added. In all, TCS sponsors 15 highway races around the globe, all however two of them marathons. (It’s the title sponsor at most of these races, however for the Chicago and Boston marathons, it’s the expertise sponsor solely, not the title sponsor.)
Consolidating its sports activities sponsorship {dollars} into one sport is permitting TCS to get extra advertising bang for its buck by creating visibility extra commonly all year long, quite than diffusely at unrelated occasions, Kumar provides. So whereas this sponsorship is uncommon in that it’s not by a model like New Steadiness, Brooks or Nike seeking to promote to customers, it raises TCS’s visibility very strategically with just a few to reaching as many individuals as potential. The New York Metropolis marathon is the largest on the planet with greater than 50,000 finishers and a whole lot of hundreds of spectators lining the 26.2-mile run via the town’s 5 boroughs.
“Our industry, our product is invisible,” says Kumar. So the concentrate on working permits TCS, which is a part of the huge Tata Group, crucially to get in entrance of numerous executives given working’s deep attain into the skilled class. “We are engaging with 4,000 business executives with our running platform. But we also see a rise in the sport and the corporate sector is taking up fitness in a big way,” he says.
TCS’ work with the massive marathons in sponsors goes past simply slapping its title on the race. For the 2014 New York marathon, TCS constructed an app for each athletes and spectators. (TCS’ predecessor because the New York marathon sponsor was Dutch financial institution ING, which had deliberate on utilizing the sponsorship to develop a bigger retail banking presence within the U.S., a enterprise from which it has since withdrawn.)
Through the years, the New York Metropolis marathon app has grown extra refined with a view to creating the race what Kumar calls “the most technologically advanced marathon.” For years, it supplied athlete monitoring. After which two years in the past, TCS added stay broadcast to the app, permitting it to be seen in 150 nations, bringing the race to new audiences.
Now TCS is tinkering with increase actuality and final yr created what it calls the primary digital coronary heart of an expert runner, specifically outstanding feminine marathoner Des Linden, which means it helped construct a digital twin that allowed her to measure her well being and efficiency and rework her coaching. Kumar says he hopes the tech can ultimately assist a runner lastly break the two-hour marathon barrier. However maybe extra crucially, this facet of the sponsorship permits TCS to showcase its tech in a method that might garner curiosity from shoppers like well being care suppliers and medical gadgets makers.
“It’s an opportunity for us to get our brand engaged with a larger set of people in an experiential manner,” says Kumar. Nonetheless, don’t anticipate TCS to go round snapping up all that many extra races, given the prices of sponsorship. The marathons TCS desires to sponsor are usually massive occasions in gateway cities and the place it has a big enterprise presence.
There’s a private aspect to this story too, Kumar says. TCS’s former CEO N. Chandrasekaran took up working within the aftermath of a well being scare. To unfold the phrase in regards to the worth of working for well being and wellness, he created a well being app for workers years in the past. Now, of the 600,000 TCS workers, some 200,000 are runners at a wide range of distances, says Kumar, who regardless of his nickname as TCS’s Chief Marathon Officer, a play on the CMO title, doesn’t himself run.
“It’s become part of the identity of our company and it’s unleashed this revolution of wellness inside our company,” says Kumar.
