Japanese pro tennis player Kei Nishikori, ranked 26th in the world, made it all the way to the quarterfinals of the Australian Open before being taken down by Andy Murray, the world’s fourth best.
Nishikori’s excellent tournament will raise him up to 20th in the world and surely has a few executives at sponsor Fast Retailing Co. and its famous retail subsidiary, Uniqlo, smiling a whole lot these days, one year into a five-year deal brokered by IMG. The same probably can’t be said for Sony, which didn’t renew a sponsorship deal last November, and Adidas, which wasn’t aggressive enough and lost its deal with Nishikori to Uniqlo.
Even though Nishikori lost the match to Murray, it was likely watched by 55 million more viewers than it would have been if Nishikori wasn’t in it. “Japan’s public broadcaster NHK purchased the rights to air” the match, Bloomberg reports, which grew the viewing audience exponentially.
“The marketing effect of this endorsement is worth tens of billions of yen,” said Toshihiro Nagahama, chief economist at Dai-Ichi Life Insurance Research Institute in Tokyo, to Bloomberg.
And Masahide Sakamoto, “a Uniqlo adviser” who travels with Nishikori told Bloomberg that his company is getting “a lot of requests, more than ever” from people who would like to own the clothes and hats Nishikori wears.
Back in 2009, Adidas dumped the man who is currently the No. 1-ranked tennis player, Novak Djokovic, and replaced him with Murray. After all, there is a bigger market to sell products to in Great Britain than in Serbia. CNBC's Darren Rovell thinks that Adidas’s “move to drop Djokovic for Andy Murray will be one of the biggest mistakes in their history.”
At the end of last year, Murray changed coaches to tennis legend Ivan Lendl. The Guardian notedthat Murray passed over his “current part-time Adidas adviser, the Australian Darren Cahill,” for the job.
Shouldn’t everybody have their own brand advisor?
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