Rackets to riches for Sharapova
How branding helped the Russian tennis star become the world’s wealthiest female athlete
deal with Nike, as well as one with Gatorade, lags behind by more than $10 million each year.
While a tennis player may grow up in Compton or in the shadow of a nuclear meltdown, somehow the game maintains an aura of pearls and polo horses, and luxury brands love it.
The sport’s audience is not as big as that of soccer or basketball, but it’s just as global — and vastly richer. At the BNP Paribas Open, almost 90 per cent of attendees are college graduates, and 70 per cent of them have household incomes in excess of $100,000. At the U.S. Open, the average household income of fans is $156,000.
“Tennis, like horse riding, golf, or sailing, is associated by the wider public with glamour, wealth, and savoir faire,” says Luca Solca, an analyst with Exane BNP Paribas who specializes in the luxury sector.
Not long after Indian Wells — she was upset in the fourth round by Italian player Flavia Pennetta—Sharapova’s in Florida for the Miami Open, at a cocktail party sponsored by Volkswagen’s Porsche. The occasion is her second year as the car company’s global brand ambassador, and she arrives in a black Panamera, a kind of sports sedan, driven by her agent, Max Eisenbud of IMG, who’s represented her since she was 12. Getting out, Sharapova towers over Eisenbud, a 41-year-old from New Jersey.
Sharapova touches the car affectionately for the photographers. She looks like a model at an auto show, but Viktoria Wohlrapp, a senior marketing manager for Porsche, says that’s not why they hired her.
Porsche is the most profitable auto brand in the world, but 85 per cent of its customers are men. The company has been plotting how to sell more cars to women for years, and management says it hopes that having a prominent female athlete associated with the brand might help correct the gender imbalance.
So it signed Sharapova to a three-year deal. But can Sharapova actually sell cars? “For us, it’s an image thing,” Wohlrapp admits. “It was very important to find someone who matches the brand, and we feel like Maria and Porsche is a good thing.”
With a brand like Nike, the Sharapova effect is relatively easy to measure: The company sells a line of Sharapova tennis apparel (designed by her), and the demand for those items is an indication of the value she creates. With watches and cars, it’s harder to gauge the impact.
But Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse, who wrote a case study in 2010 about the building of Brand Sharapova, says luxury brands are deriving tangible benefits from sponsorship deals: “These companies wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t see some value.”
Maria Sharapova is in a pretty good mood for someone who might be about tolose a tournament. It’s mid-March and she’s just made the two-hour drive from her beachfront home in Los Angeles to the desert town of Indian Wells, Calif., the site of the BNP Paribas Open.
The tournament is owned by Larry Ellison, the software mogul and seventh-richest person in the world. In the past five years, through $100 million US of upgrades and the help of sponsors such as Rolex and Emirates Airline, he’s turned it into one of the premier stops on the men’s and women’s tour.
“It’s a bit more personal for me to come here,” Sharapova, 28, says of Indian Wells. “I have a lot of friends and family who come to watch.”
At the pre-match news conference, Sharapova, in black-and-white exercise pants and a billowy grey tank top, handles questions gracefully.
She’s held steady this year in the No. 2 spot in the women’s rankings. No. 2!
Few people in the history of the game have struck the ball as cleanly as she does from both sides of the court, and at 6-foot-2, she has the reach and athleticism to thrive on both hard and grass courts.
And yet she’s spent her career in the shadow of Serena Williams, the No. 1 player in the world — perhaps of all time.
Sharapova was just 17 when she beat Williams in the 2004 Wimbledon final. A U.S. Open title followed soon thereafter. She’s since won the Australian Open twice and the French Open once, bringing her total Grand Slam wins to five.
It seemed almost certain that Sharapova and Williams would end up archenemies, trading major opens in the style of John McEnroe and Björn Borg or Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. But Sharapova beat Williams in their next faceoff and then never again. Their head-to-head record is 17-2 in Williams’s favour, with Sharapova losing their last 16 meetings.
The lopsided run is partly a result of a series of major shoulder injuries Sharapova had in the mid-2000s that weakened her once spectacular serve. This left her without the weapon she needed to gain an early edge in matches, to maintain momentum in the middle, and to rescue her when she was down.
Second place has its consolations, though, especially if you are tall and blond.
Sharapova is the highest-paid female athlete in the world, according to Forbes data, and she’s topped the list for the past decade. She made $22 million from endorsements in 2014, including an eight-year, $70-million deal with Nike, a five-year contract with Evian, and deals with Cole Haan, Tag Heuer, and other brands. Williams, who also has a