Ambush Marketing: Godfrey Phillips (India) Limited and the Four Square Cricket Equipment Program

In 1994 ambush marketing was an unknown concept in India. I had just quit my job as head of sponsorship and events for all tobacco brands at ITC Limited, to set up my own sports marketing consultancy and was looking for my first client.

In the tobacco industry at that time, ITC’s Wills Filter was competing against Godfrey Phillips’ Four Square Kings. WILLS was the vastly bigger brand with a pan-India presence while the Four Square brand franchise was confined to the North and West of India. Consequently, ITC also had a vastly larger promotions and marketing budget for the WILLS brand and at that time, was using cricket as the brand promotional vehicle, with the sponsorship of the Indian cricket team (a deal I had done while at ITC) and the title sponsorship of the Cricket World Cup in 1996 which was to be called the Wills World Cup.

Four Square in comparison had no promotional platform and very limited budgets. The solution we presented them with, was to enter into individual agreements with members of the Indian cricket team, to have them endorse the Four Square brand on their cricketing equipment. We suggested to Godfrey Phillips India, that the marketing tag line for this program should be “Batting for India”.

We subsequently successfully negotiated equipment sponsorship contracts with members of the Indian cricket team for Godfrey Phillips (India) Limited. This program became one of the most copied sponsorship concepts in India (we were followed by ITC themselves, Britannia and MRF who continue to use this platform, even today) and ran continuously until December 2002. The players contracted under this program included, V.V.S. Laxman, Sanjay Manjrekar, Vinod Kambli, Javagal Srinath, Venkatesh Prasad, Nayan Mongia, Rajesh Chauhan, Nilesh Kulkarni, Sunil Joshi, Venkatapathy Raju and Aashish Kapoor. This program gave the Four Square brand international television exposure for the first time, allowed Four Square to share the 1996 World Cup stage with WILLS (for a miniscule fraction of the promotional expense) and was referred to by Mr. K.K.Modi  as “an outstanding contribution to the company.”

Here are links to the 2 of the TVCs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIKA6pAewpg

https://twitter.com/sanjaymanjrekar/status/1117704059522179072

Pepsi subsequently followed this up with an ambush marketing campaign of their own “Nothing official about it” to combat Coca-Cola being the Official Drink of the 1996 World Cup. This prompted the International Cricket Council (ICC) to frame rules to prevent ambush marketing https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/tp-brandline/article29138762.ece.