Good and Bad PR scorecard: Saint-Gobain sixers, 'Chelsea -Nike Football' homekit & JioStar’s Women’s T20

Welcome to this week's Good and Bad PR where we rate some of the most high profile PR campaigns we've seen in India over the past two weeks. We rate each campaign by our complicated black box evaluation methodology which uses 3 assessment levels:

[Rating Metre: Hmmm… → Not bad at all! → Oof, this is awesome!]

But why, Chelsea?

Football clubs have spent decades building the sort of cultural relevance most brands would sacrifice a limb for. Fans tattoo logos on themselves. They travel across countries to watch eleven people kick a ball around for ninety minutes.

Then why, I wonder, does Chelsea seem so determined to sell a football shirt as everything except a football shirt?

The club's latest Can't Tame Us campaign leans heavily into celebrity culture, lifestyle imagery and fashion-world aesthetics. At times, the jersey feels almost incidental to the spectacle.

Perhaps that's the point. Football, apparently, is no longer enough for football. The shirt now needs a side hustle as a cultural artefact. Enter celebrities, fashion, and the increasingly common belief that no product is complete until it becomes a lifestyle.

Maybe that's smart business. Football clubs are no longer competing only with other football clubs. They're competing with every other cultural obsession fighting for attention.

Yet, I keep coming back to the thought that nothing changes. Fans still show up for the game. The trophies. The rivalries. Inevitable heartbreak. Irrational loyalty.

Not because Madonna wore the shirt.

Rating: Hmmm…

Attention, shoppers! Fandom is available at Counter 3.

Sports fans are notoriously difficult customers. Nobody knows where they come from, they rarely behave rationally, and once acquired, they tend to stick around for decades. Fandom, in all honesty, has never been particularly good at following a marketing plan.

But that didn’t stop JioStar from having a go.

JioStar's latest Women's T20 World Cup campaign starts with a deceptively ambitious brief: find more fans. 

Not viewers. Not subscribers. Fans. The sort of people who reorganise their schedules around match timings, develop strong opinions about batting orders, and voluntarily invite emotional turmoil into their lives every tournament season.

To be fair, the campaign isn't entirely wrong to try. Women's cricket doesn't have an awareness problem anymore. Most sports fans know it exists. The challenge is getting people to care enough to keep showing up when there isn't a World Cup around the corner. 

The campaign gets one thing right: people don't fall in love with tournaments. They fall in love with having a reason to care.

Rating: Not bad at all

Swinging like there’s no tomorrow

Any Indian kid has either played or encountered a game of cricket at least once. Along with the exhilaration of catching the ball before it hits the boundary came a deadly fear of the ball flying all the way to a second-storey neighbourhood window. All bets were off. Run for your lives.

It wasn't about playing gully cricket. The threat was never swinging at a ball. It was what happened after the ball hit glass. Shudder.

Saint-Gobain's As Tough As Glass campaign takes that familiar childhood memory and turns it on its head. You see the ball fly towards the window, heartbeat quickens, generations of muscle memory kick in, and then... nothing. The glass survives.

This takes me back to the 2005 Surf Excel campaign Daag Achhe Hain (stains are good). It audaciously challenged an age-old assumption that the stain was the problem. Surf Excel asked us if the experience was worth more than the shirt.

Cut to Saint-Gobain bringing back that same audacity. What if hitting a sixer in a narrow lane isn't the problem? What if it’s the glass we need to change?

Simple but powerful shift. And deeply satisfying, when a product makes its case without hiding behind a celebrity, life lesson, or cinematic subplot.

All you need, sometimes, is proof hurling towards the window at breakneck speed.

Rating: Oof, this is awesome