China has become the hoop-crazed country after Yao Ming, the 7″6 big guy, joined the Houston Rockets in 2001. Since then, NBA gained a huge popularity and increasing profit in China and China becomes the biggest overseas market for NBA.
However, when Yao Ming announced his retirement in 2011, many people were worried that their biggest oversea market will shrink. Surprisingly, the market didn’t shrink at all and grow in an amazing speed instead.
“China is our number one market outside of the United States,” Heidi Ueberroth, president of NBA International, told Reuters. “The growth has been very significant and very much on track, and we are very much still just scratching the surface.”
Because of their shrewd business strategies, Chinese market is the “big pie” even a “bigger pie” after Yao’s retirement.
NBA marketers keep using star power to attract more target customers in China. They are not only selling the NBA brand but also selling the Star image to Chinese basketball fans. They are always trying to tell their customers in China that there are more basketball stars in NBA after Yao’s retirement, like Lebron James, Kobe Bryant.
In order to expand their influence in China, the NBA stars are coming to China to play pre-season games. That means that a large amount of basket ball fans in China will buy the games’ tickets and make contributions to NBA’s total profit. What’s more, the games held in China also build the connections between Chinese fans and NBA stars and has a positive effect on selling sub-products, like NBA stars’ basketball sneakers and jerseys.
In order to gain bigger popularity in China, NBA even decided to adjust their schedule and time for China and Asian market. In that case, the schedule is not only for China but for the entire Asian continent and therefore drastically increase their followers not only in China but also other asian countries.