Case Details
TJ Sports: Creating the World’s Top Esports League
More than 73 million tuned in online for the League of Legends (LoL) World Championship, the premier annual international championship for LoL—a team-based personal computer (PC) strategy game.
This was a watershed moment for electronic sports (esports) and Tengjing Sports (TJ Sports) — a joint venture of Chinese technology giant Tencent and LoL’s video game developer Riot Games founded to promote the competitive play of LoL.
In 2021, a nationwide marketing campaign in China named “Esports as a Sport” was launched jointly by TJ Sports and its sponsor TCL, a Chinese consumer electronic brand. Behind the campaign was Mr. Cruz Chen (Cruz), TJ Sport’s Brand Manager and his series of marketing decisions.
The campaign was vastly successful. Going forward, though, there were still critical questions to be answered. How could TJ Sports leverage the success of the “Esports as a Sport” campaign to create the top esports league in the world? How could esports help sustain interest towards LoL, a 14-year-old PC game? How much could TJ Sports reshape the longstanding perception in China, that video games were distracting, desensitizing, even addictive? Cruz recognized that there was still much that TJ Sports had to offer.
1. How can a company develop effective marketing strategies to elevate its brand image and more specifically to reshape its market perception?
2. How does a company/brand design a marketing campaign that enhances its branding while satisfying its collaborators’/sponsors’ needs/wants?
3. How can a brand that primarily appeals to certain groups, such as young people, increase its visibility and association with desirable values in the broader mass market?
4. The esports industry: How is esports similar to and different from traditional sports?
5. The cultural evolution of video games: How have video games transformed from a form of entertainment for young, male consumers to a type of sports with a growing audience?