CBS Corporation (CBS), The Walt Disney Company (DIS), and The Bizarre Business of the Masters: Handshake Deals and America’s Greatest Sporting Event

An opportunity to be remarkable
The Masters is succeeding because it offers a unique product that moves in the opposite direction of sports. Television and stadium money flowing into sports has meant better coverage of sports, but it also has its downsides. More television money means concessions to advertisers.

The Masters zigs where others zag, and the premium experience it offers stands out that much more every year. None of this is to say that other sports are wrong to chase more and more sponsorship and advertising dollars; better coverage has brought in more viewers and increased the value of teams several times over. It’s ordinary for sports leagues to chase bigger deals. The Masters is remarkable not for the amount of money it makes, but for the quality of its product.

No for-profit business could behave exactly like The Masters, but there are some parallels to be observed. For example, a company like Whole Foods Market, Inc. (NASDAQ:WFM) has succeeded because it offered a more pleasing and high-end food shopping experience while the rest of the industry competed endlessly on price. It succeeded because it was offering something unique and premium that consumers desired. Like the Masters, the success of Whole Foods was based in how remarkable it was — how uncommon and extraordinary compared with its peers.

The difference between Whole Foods and the Masters? Once Whole Foods succeeded, there was a rush of companies trying to copy it. When the iPhone hit, Android soon followed. Business is extraordinary in how quickly great ideas can be copied. These ideas are copied, because they’re making wheelbarrows full of money.

Yet no one is copying the idea of the Masters, because its advantage in sports is that it harks back to tradition and a purity of the game, and that’s something that little extra money comes with.

With each passing year, the Masters just becomes more peerless and remarkable.

The article The Bizarre Business of the Masters: Handshake Deals and America’s Greatest Sporting Event originally appeared on Fool.com.

Eric Bleeker, CFA, has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Walt Disney and owns shares of IBM and Walt Disney.

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