Pressure. A word and a feeling most of us relate to, none more so than myself currently as I try and pen down a few lines on an article I was very politely coerced into piecing together by our Corporate Communications team.

However, I am pretty certain barring examination season, ‘pressure’ appears more in sporting columns, TV debates around a crucial game, bar room conversations among friends, internet chat rooms et al. Point is pressure was a word, I feel, designed and coined for every sports lover out there.

We all live with the pressure of our heroes. I remember shedding more than a bead of sweat watching Boris Becker play at Wimbledon, or Tiger at Augusta when he played that unbelievable pitch onto the 17th green or the Hand of God by Maradona. If we are all vicarious creatures by the virtue of being human beings, there is none greater a vicarious existence than the one we live through the life of a sportsman.

So, what makes something emotional such as sport transcend into a business and start being looked at through the prism of that ultimate science - economics?

If anyone has read Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid or Freakonomics, there are a few things that stand out and one can correlate to the business of sport.

I can try and explain it through a simple arithmetic. For the surfeit of cynicism and grey matter in this world, humans essentially love aspiring, react to incentives and finally the idea of being ‘just’. Sport combines these more than any other vocation, pastime and therefore passion. So what we have is an equation that is a winner: ‘exponential passion = aspiration + instant justice + incentive x human needs’.

To just give a few examples which most of us are not aware of an even shocked me – just parking charges alone at U.S. sporting events generate close to 2.5 billion dollars in revenue. Legal fees and lawyers generate close to 40 billion in revenue. It just gives us an example of the two ends of the pyramid generating exponential revenue at the relevant ‘competence levels’ and hence phenomenal employment opportunities.

Sport in the U.S. is believed to be five times bigger than Hollywood. This again takes me back to a discussion I had with a friend of mine when we explored the opportunity to start retail driven business in India. On a business principle we had agreed that we need to give something to a consumer which he wants most of the week  but someday he will need at least once in that week. This is in a nutshell what a sport does – the day when the want moves into the realm of need, you have a winning proposition. Another contrarian and what some may find scary view is what I learnt from a psychologist who studies consumer behaviour. Post IPL he had four patients who went into depression as the Royal Challengers lost in the semi finals. If you were to ask Lalit Modi, he would say on a public forum that ‘’it’s disturbing’’ but believe me as a sports marketer he has reached the pinnacle of creating a brand that people now need as opposed to want.

As we move to a hyper consumer driven and digital age where the access to everything through the internet is making more of us aware of what we are missing out on, I am convinced that Percept’s foray into boxing will be a path breaking.

For any good product once the target group has been defined one can either choose to go wide as a marketer or go for depth. Cricket today has achieved the marketers’ dream of achieving both and its ‘baap’ as one would call it is the game of football which has done this across the globe.

Through the platform of boxing, we are hoping to achieve depth at the beginning and in time achieve a ‘distribution model’ where we get as many people from across the geography of the country to ‘consume’ the product that we have to offer.

p.s. To the five people who may read this, I thank you and shamelessly urge you to keep watching sport – aspire, be unabashedly vicarious and truly experience life and the gamut of emotions sport will bring to you.