Sell Therapy

Yuvraj Singh and the art of cancer marketing

Soon after Yuvraj Singh was diagnosed with cancer, it was slightly startling to see an SMS on your phone offering his story in his own words. It turned out to be a voice blog, which was fair enough, except that there was a fee attached to it by the telecom service provider. What they asked for was not much, but given that Yuvraj was not Lance Armstrong, it was still money that could be better spent elsewhere. There was also the question of what exactly he would have to say. For surely, just as one does not contract cancer by will power, there is not much you can do to get out of it beyond taking the treatment that the doctors prescribe.

Around the same time, you again saw Yuvraj on advertisements on television alluding to his condition. It was followed by another voice speaking on the benefits of Birla Sun Life insurance. When he was in the US getting treated, there were regular updates on Twitter with photo ops, and the media was peppered with bytes of celebrity friends talking about his courage. Once he was cancer-free, out of the blue, Indian selectors picked a man who had not played competitive cricket for ten months for the T20 World Cup. The only logic has to be compassion because the reason given by the selectors—past performance—was absurd. By that token, they might as well have picked Mohinder Amarnath.

And immediately there was another advertisement of Birla Sun Life with Yuvraj, fatalism written all over him but without the grimness of the earlier ad, sighing about the inevitability of life’s ups and downs to a group of kids. You could almost call it spiritual until you found yourself taking a policy with Birla Sun Life.

In the history of cricket, Yuvraj will not go down for his heroic comeback—because, scratch your head, what is the heroism in getting the best treatment in the world for stage 1 cancer? For a fairy tale, a man has to claw his way back from insurmountable odds and not amble onto the field on a red carpet with cancer survivor scrawled a thousand times on it. Instead, Yuvraj will be the man who fathered a whole new avenue of endorsement for celebrities—the selling of one’s ailment.

About The Author

Madhavankutty Pillai

Madhavankutty Pillai has no specialisations whatsoever. He is among the last of the generalists. And also Open chief of bureau, Mumbai  

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