Why one company went all in on marathons

If you’ve ever run or attended a marathon, odds are you’ve seen the letters “TCS.”

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a B2B tech services company, currently has 14 active marathon partnerships, including sponsorships with five of the seven World Marathon Majors, according to Global Chief Marketing Officer Abhinav Kumar.

Outside of its presence in running, though, TCS is scarce in sports.

“Once we discovered the magic of marathons, we [made] a decision about 15 years ago that we shut down everything else,” Kumar told Marketing Brew. Now, the company’s entire sports marketing portfolio, with the exception of a title sponsorship of the Jaguar Formula E team, is centered on running.

TCS started sponsoring marathons a couple of years after its 2004 IPO, with the goal of raising its brand profile, Kumar said. Since then, the brand has found that focusing on the running world helps the company connect more deeply with its customers and employees, many of whom are runners themselves.

Off to the races

Every runner remembers their first marathon, and some sponsors do, too. TCS’s was the Mumbai Marathon in 2008, now called the Tata Mumbai Marathon, which was part of a 10-year deal inked in 2017. Before that naming rights deal, the Amsterdam Marathon became the brand’s first title sponsorship of a race in 2010, Kumar said.

Before the push into marathons, TCS was active in sports like Formula 1, cycling, and cricket, which brought with them their own set of benefits. F1 in particular allowed TCS employees to give clients access to race-day experiences, like meet and greets with drivers, Kumar said.

But after Mumbai, Amsterdam, and a partnership with New York Road Runners, the organization behind the New York City Marathon, TCS quite literally hit the ground running.

“As we started discovering the sport, I think we had a light-bulb moment,” he said. “Unlike many of the other sports where you have a fantastic spectator and hospitality experience, the difference here is that our customers, partners, and colleagues who participate in this sport are actually the athletes.”

Across the 14 marathons TCS sponsors each year, about 8,000 employees and 4,000 customers participate, according to Kumar. Of the company’s 607,000 employees, one-third of them are runners in some capacity, he added. The sport doesn’t just offer a point of connection for the brand and its stakeholders, but offers a chance to form deeper ties.

“Everyone has their unique reasons to do it, but their emotional involvement with this is just phenomenal,” Kumar said. “And look, in the sector we are in, in B2B technology services, usually it’s not a sector that you get emotional or excited about.”

Track-ing

In addition to title sponsorships, TCS aims to show up at its marathons with activations that support its staff and clients, as well as the rest of the runners. At the New York City Marathon, for instance, the company sets up hospitality tents at the start and finish lines with amenities like food, drinks, and stretching services for TCS runners. TCS also books out Tavern on the Green in Central Park, where runners’ families can wait for them to finish, and where runners can enjoy massages when they’ve completed their 26.2 miles, Kumar said.

Non-TCS runners will encounter the company’s branding along the route, as well as on shirts and other race merchandise. And to reach beyond its stakeholder base, TCS also showcases its tech at marathons with services like virtual course maps and mobile apps with features like runner tracking and predicted finish times. In 2023, TCS debuted the Future Athlete Program, partnering with Boston Marathon champion and two-time Olympian Des Linden to create and analyze a digital replica of her heart.

While TCS strives to help the runners, marathons help TCS brand in turn: A recent report from the company found that its brand consideration among nonrunners is 27%, but among marathoners, that number jumps to 67%. For some of the bigger races broadcast around the world, TCS sees between $10 million and $20 million in equivalent media value, Kumar added.

It’s a symbiotic relationship with the broader running ecosystem as well, which doesn’t tend to see as much sponsorship interest as some other major sports despite the increasing number of marathons around the world, he said.

“I think that will change with time,” Kumar said. “While it may be undernourished from [a sponsorship] point of view…running as a sport is exploding, so we’ll see more and more on this front.”

Correction 5/28/2025: This piece has been updated to remove an incorrect figure about TCS’s total number of endurance running sponsorship deals.