The game is the message

Global luxury brands in India will increasingly associate with niche sports like polo, archery, shooting and watersports.

With Equisport Management having tied up the polo season for the Polo Club in Mumbai, the company's managing director, Major Adhiraj Singh is upbeat about the opportunity it opens up for lifestyle sports in the city.

"Polo," he says, "fills a niche with a target audience of 1,000-2,000 people for anyone indulging in corporate hospitality, sponsor messages and visuals, and a great treat (the high-tea) at the end of it all."

The Polo Club will now host the season, but Equisport will pay a fee to run it. It will handle the marketing, sponsorship and PR, generating funds in the process. "It's a huge commercial opportunity," says Singh, "and the way the game will be presented will be very professional."

Equisport has also announced the first of its major brand associations with the Bvlgari Cup to be hosted through this week, ending in a grand finale on Sunday.

"For luxury brands," says Singh, "there is no other sport they can associate with." And beside art and culture events, sponsorships will have to seek out opportunities in lifestyle sports "" nascent still in India, but that's something Equisport wants to plug with polo, watersports in Mumbai, archery, shooting, and the creamy layer of golf.

"We see a huge potential in corporate hospitality related to lifestyle sports," says Singh; "it'll have a huge future in the next five years."

Already, the initiatives in polo are beginning to pay off. "Mumbai has only horse racing that comes close to a lifestyle sport, but the sponsor associations there are part of a very broad spectrum; besides there's its association with gambling."

Polo offers the niche position global luxury brands require, and with the quality of the game improving, its ramifications are already coming to light.

The crown prince of Johor, training with the 61 Cavalry in Jaipur, for instance, has imported 33 Argentinian horses (at a cost of Rs 10-15 lakh each) and, says Singh, their participation in any tournament has injected a dose of quality into the sport.

No wonder professional promoters such as Naveen Jindal, and Singh himself, have started importing Argentinian ponies (Vijay Mallya had got them long ago) to stay at par.

For a sponsor, polo offers the right image, visibility, brand rub-off and target audience, creating an irrefutable brand positioning that is associated with luxury.

Unlike in golf (which is an individual sport where you play for the prize money), in polo the prize money is less important than the contractual fees polo professionals grab from sponsors/teams to play the tournament for a season, and of late these have been increasingly sharply "" by as much as 50 per cent in the last couple of years in general, and up to 100 per cent in some cases.

How much would a sponsor need to spend on a team for a season? Adhiraj Singh reasons it could be to the tune of Rs 4 lakh per tournament (a team will play 10-20 tournaments in a season), plus the cost of acquiring horses, practise fields, stable hands, vets, inter-city transportation of horses and so on. "Investment in polo," he suggests, "is growing hugely."

Enough, certainly, for those like industrialist Naveen Jindal and hotelier Biki Oberoi to invest in 15-acre polo fields, laying the way for the sport's future growth.

"Infrastructure is critical," argues Singh, who wants to create polo heroes (like golf's Tiger Woods) to take the game ahead.

Besides, he's hoping to capitalise by taking Indian polo international through sponsored teams and sponsored events.

Logically, he would also like to see the spillover of polo from the big cities to smaller metros like Pune, or alternate destinations like Amby Valley.

Meanwhile, Equisport is talking to sponsors to develop concepts for other lifestyle sports such as archery, shooting and watersports in Mumbai harbour.

Golf is another area Singh has sewn up, though here his efforts seem directed at getting golf to people through a tie-up with a Singapore-based international golf company, aimed primarily at corporate programmes, making golf accessible to new or young entrants to the game.