Is basketball helping Kia sell cars?

Columbian Autocar Corp., the official distributor of Kia vehicles in the country, has owned a team in the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) since 2014. The squad is approaching the end of what is presumably a five-year minimum contract with the professional league, so perhaps it’s time to wonder whether splurging the bulk of the automaker’s marketing budget on the nation’s favorite sport has yielded favorable results.

Of course, Kia isn’t the first car company to join the PBA to try and turn its brand into a household name. In the ’70s, Toyota endeared itself to Filipinos by running a team that was exciting to watch and won often. That team also cemented the status of Robert Jaworski as the most celebrated player in the history of the league. Four decades later, even casual basketball fans can still recite the names of the team’s core members: Francis Arnaiz, Ramon Fernandez, Abe King, Danny Florencio and Arnie Tuadles. People packed the Araneta Coliseum just to watch them shoot hoops, and the public so gobbled up pretty much everything these players said and did that Toyota used them on print ads and TV commercials.

In other words, hemorrhaging money into a professional basketball team paid dividends for Toyota back then, which, if you ask me, also played a significant role in boosting the company’s brand recall even with the Japanese marque pulling out of the Philippine market in the ’80s. The cognomens “Tamaraw” and “Corolla” — patently embroidered on bright-red and white jerseys — achieved the kind of nationwide prominence no conventional advertising campaign could have provided.

Marketing students need to understand, however, that Toyota became popular not because Jaworski and Arnaiz were good-looking (although that helped to a degree). The club became legendary not because the players appeared in movies and attended glitzy parties. No, they became popular and legendary because they kept winning. In all, they collected a total of nine championship titles from 1975 to 1983.

Nobody roots for losers, except for their mothers (and even this is not a guarantee). Everyone naturally associates with victors. So you can imagine how many customers snapped up “Macho Machines” in the ’70s just because they wanted to look like virile basketball champs.

Fast-forward to the present. The Kia team — renamed “Picanto” for this season in honor of the newly launched third-generation mini hatchback — is dead-last in the standings after six games. Its record in the ongoing Governors Cup? A dismal 0-6. Yep, not a solitary game won.

I watched the team’s fourth game live, against the Ginebra Gin Kings. If you ever needed to grasp the chasm between a perennial contender and a cellar-dweller, this was the perfect game to see. It was over by the third quarter, with Ginebra leading by nearly 30 points and inserting benchwarmers to finish the job. Kia’s offense was awful, its defense even worse. It was like witnessing a professional basketball team toy with junior varsity.

Throughout the game, I kept asking Kia Philippines marketing head Nenuka Guba about the players, none of whom I recognized. Heck, it has only been a couple of weeks and I can’t even remember a single name. Then again, it’s probably due to brain cells having a propensity to die during middle age.

I also kept thinking whether Kia executives weren’t regretting having reclaimed the team’s name. You see, a year after being introduced as Kia Sorento, the team was christened Mahindra Enforcer. The Indian vehicle maker is represented in the country by the same group that manages Kia, and at that time the bosses felt Mahindra needed the exposure more. So here, too, was a telling indication of the organization’s half-hearted approach to its PBA experiment: Use the league simply to give its brands some hype. Couple this with the much-maligned appointment of Manny Pacquiao as playing coach, and you just know the team treated its PBA participation with levity.

Hence, I’m not sure spending heavily like this is a good way to exhaust one’s marketing and advertising budget. I read an article online that the current minimum salary for a player today is around P50,000 a month. That’s the minimum. Go figure how much it costs to pay an entire squad, complete with trainers and assistants. The only way to justify expenditure this substantial is if the team wins at least a third of its games, not with the deputy coach openly calling out his players for a collective lack of effort.

Thankfully, there’s a lot of promise in the car after which the team is named. You could argue the all-new Picanto doesn’t need publicity from a nationally televised basketball tournament to sell in record numbers. Available in two variants (1.0L M/T and 1.2L A/T), the latest version of the Korean runabout is now the most stylish in its class. Which made me muse loudly to Kia Philippines president Ginia R. Domingo about how the Picanto might be better off being marketed in the UAAP, before a predominantly millennial crowd.

To my surprise, Ms. Domingo had this to say: “Actually, kids today don’t like small cars. They prefer bigger crossovers. The Picanto appeals the most to housewives, as a second car for running errands.”

Mmm… well, in that case, maybe winning championships isn’t all that important, if you know what I mean.

You may e-mail the author at vbsarne@visor.ph.