On Corporates and Culture

Thsi appeared in the Deccan Herald

It’s monsoon time and Malhar, the festival at St. Xaviers College Mumbai is in full swing with animation and activity in every frame of an entire generation that populates these ancient premises with such joie-de-vivre.
The famous wooded quadrangle houses the festival stalls, and Pepsi very prominently, while BPCL banners and logos compete with red and white AirTel logos in the approach quadrangle. It’s an industrious mix of college and the corporate and a combination that seems completely Win-win.

For college fests today are increasingly becoming mega-events, mini microcosms as it were of a competitive world, where contestants write copy, design board games, plead cases in courtrooms and sing for a lot more than their supper. The heart of these creative, very “productive”, fun extravaganzas is of course the corporate sponsorship.

Types of sponsorship
Varying in degrees, such sponsorship could begin with contributing prizes for informal events like quizzes, to picking up the tab as the title sponsorship for amounts ranging from a few lakhs to ten lakhs. For the students it's the only way they can plan an event of such magnitude, and as Anindita Sanger of Sophia's Kaleidoscope succinctly puts it, “Without the money there’s no show”.

Festivals today typically have several competitive events packed into 3-4 days, with 2 or 3 special performances from well known artistes, both classical, pop, fusion et al. Besides this there are workshops on varied themes ranging from pottery and theatre to dream analysis! All this comes at a price though ranging from a couple of lakhs for the smaller fests to as high as Rs 25 lakh for fest at the larger better-known colleges. There’s a tremendous amount of fun and learning and talent that goes into both the organisation and the participation of such events and this is the other aspect of sponsorship — just as corporates invest in Art, as Alok Jhamb, CEO, AirTel explains, “Youth is all about fun and we as corporates should step in with our support.”

Market penetration
It’s also all about marketing and market penetration. For corporates, especially those who have a “youth brand” association, a college festival with its concentration of an ideal target audience, provides a unique advertising opportunity. As Suparna Mitra, Business Head, Lee explains, “For a youth brand like Lee, college sponsorships are an important part of the brand’s promotion plans. Connecting with the youth is a challenge in these times when media is fragmented and the lifestyles of the young involve “hanging out” in cafes, pubs etc rather than appointment TV watching. Also, the task is complicated as getting mind share is even more difficult as the young are often into multi-tasking when engaging in traditional media - e.g. sending SMS messages, surfing the net, reading magazines while watching TV or listening to radio.”

Alok Jhamb, CEO, AirTel, agrees with the importance of brand presence at a college festival. “We target the upwardly mobile youth segment, they are very critical to us both in terms of being brand ambassadors of a sort through their usage and also in providing a large potential as we take them up the lifecycle.”

For AirTel, College Fests are the beginnings of the student corporate interaction and one that sometimes develops into live projects and a marketing effort that is truly “viral”. Himanshu Chakrawarti, General Manager Marketing at Tata’s lifestyle store, Westside, also finds College fests an important marketing platform, “the college going crowd, which forms a large part of our target segment is difficult to reach through regular media. Participation in such festivals through sponsoring events like the fashion show gives us an opportunity to showcase our products and to build better bonding, encouraging students to come to our stores.”

Westside’s experience has been very positive, participation in college fests has actually seen an increase in sales every time- so much so that Westside has begun to conduct inter college fests in Pune and Chennai.
Yet for all this, marketing departments at the fests, whose job it is to go out and collect sponsorships describe it as a hard job. Sangram Kadam, Member of IIT Bombay’s Mood Indigo Core Committee, explains how marketing for the fest held in December every year begins as early as May. “It’s all about bargaining,” says Anshuman, marketing for Xaviers Malhar.

Value for money
Corporates in turn discuss the value for money concept, as sponsorship amounts for the larger festivals could be high enough to pay for 4 or 5 ten second spots on prime time television. The title sponsor for Xaviers Malhar, spread over 4-5 days with an exposure to several thousand students, could instead feature a hoarding at a prime location on Marine Drive, Mumbai for as long as two months for the same price. Besides this sponsorship has also to be woven in intrinsically into the festival rather than being pasted on.

As Suparna Mitra, Business Head, Lee elaborates, “Sponsorship and the brand should be worked well into the event rather than just be an exercise of putting up brand posters and banners in the event location and getting a few mentions from the MC. In Lee, for example, last year, we had sponsored freshers’ parties for a few colleges in Delhi where the brand was worked into a personality contest among the freshers and a Mr Lee and a Ms Lee was chosen from among the freshers.”

Where corporate sponsorship has transformed the face of the festival, it has also intensified commercial exposure to a class that’s increasingly consumerist. Yet in the ultimate analysis, it is a reflection of the real world as also a symbiotic meeting of mind and matter, with a product thrown in for every prodigy, be a it a biggie like the Hero Honda for Mr Umang at the N M College Festival or coupons for coffee.