'Sachin's brand value untouched by retirement calls'

Mumbai: The clamour for his retirement from at least one form of the game will not in any way impact the brand value of Sachin Tendulkar, asserts sports marketing company World Sports Group (WSG) which manages the batting maestro’s endorsement deals. “We work with a player with realistic expectation. He (Tendulkar) is a little beyond the game today. Yes, there is an immediacy and specific set of discussion happening in the public space. [caption id=“attachment_227673” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Indian youngsters wear masks of Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar as they distribute pamphlets to passer-by during a promotional campaign for the Fiat Palio, for which Tendulkar was a brand ambassador. File photo 2001. Reuters”]  [/caption] “From commercial point of view, most of the associations he has, are long running — at least of a decade,” WSG country head and senior vice-president Harish Krishnamachar said at a media conference on Monday to announce the company’s association with upcoming batsman Cheteshwar Pujara. “That immediacy in terms of value, we tend to draw from the media but it doesn’t happen in reality. In general, marketers view this as a long-term investment and they don’t look at it as a short term,” he added. Krishnamachar said WSG, which also handles the account of Indian opener Gautam Gambhir, had taken into consideration the uncertainty on how long Tendulkar’s career would extend when it had signed him in 2006-07. “Nobody knew how long he would play. We did not know that whether he would play for the next six years, so we had factored that as well as how we could look at brand Tendulkar and keep it logically alive (post-retirement).” Notwithstanding the failures of Tendulkar and Gambhir in Australia, their commercial interests were doing well, the WSG official said. PTI