Communications professional Maharshi Vaishnav is a BIG fan of Tiger Woods, the golfer. Armed with statistical data he proves how and why Tiger Woods, the brand ambassador will take longer to bounce back.
This burlesque on the now infamous Accenture campaign bears testimony to the fact that the once ‘every marketeer’s dream’ has come crumbling down within a span of a fortnight….and how.
As increasing number of skeletons (read lurid details) are tumbling out of Tiger Woods’s closet, the world is abuzz with what will ultimately remain of the monolith brand Tiger Woods and what will happen to the brands that have continued their association with / dissociated from Tiger Woods. Stories with insight, foresight and hindsight (another Accenture campaign) are burgeoning with unmitigated pervasiveness.
As mistress no. 14 comes out of the shroud, the collateral damage to everyone associated with Tiger Woods is incomprehensible. The Tiger Woods’s saga of infidelities has rocked the sporting world, the marketing /advertising world and his millions of fans. Since ramming his Cadillac Escalade into a fire hydrant outside his Florida mansion, on the November 27, the perfect world around the perfect brand icon has ended prematurely. It is fast sinking into a quagmire of moral indiscretions. Tiger Woods has been forced into an indefinite sabbatical in order to set his house in order and win back his wife. This is detrimental for him and the game.
Accenture, Gillette & Gatorade have already pulled out of multi-million dollar sponsorship deals with the disgraced golf God. It is ironical that Accenture - a management consulting firm who gave advice for a living is grappling with credibility and image issues. A company that counsels clients on technology and logistics cannot have a brand endorser who is naïve to technology (forgets to delete his mistresses’ messages) and cannot manage his libido in a more logistical manner (gets his mistresses’ home while his wife is away on pregnancy). So is the case with Gillette. Their slogan “The best a man can have….” is a misfit for Tiger Woods who is in such a mess. Tag Heuer, AT&T, American Express & Electronic Arts are adopting a wait and watch policy.
In a borderless world driven by rampant consumerism and innate voyeurism, the brouhaha surrounding the Tiger Woods saga is obvious and inexorable. A modern day adage in America says “if there was a television set in every living room 70 years ago, Americans would have never elected a man in a wheelchair (read President Franklin Roosevelt).” Now that we have gone beyond televisions to the World Wide Web propelled real time news updates, social media and user generated content, the current outcry seems to be just the tip of the iceberg.
So why is anybody and everybody who has the remotest connection with golf so desperate to find out what happens next? I mean its not the first time that a sports icon has erred. There have always been Ben Johnson, Hansie Cronje, Shane Warne, Marion Jones, Kobe Bryant, Andre Agassi, more recently Michael Phelps and the others. Sportspersons’ recklessness on the field and off the field including substance abuse, violence, philandering etc. has been witnessed forever now. Why is the world suddenly so interested in Tiger Woods’s lapses?
The answer to this lies in the fact that Tiger Woods has been a trendsetter, a phenomenal success on & off the greens and a quintessential personal brand success story.
The first Afro-American in golf, he has transcended race and class barriers. Tiger Woods transformed golf from an elitist sport played by the upper echelon of the society into a household game that increasing number of people wanted to participate in. Golf’s increased popularity and aspirational value is thanks only to Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods’s presence has metamorphosed golf from being a somber sport thronged and watched only by the middle aged and above to one of the most widely watched sports across the world. He has brought in youthful exuberance to golf. He has single handedly managed to draw record crowds at tournaments & viewers on television and forced the administrators to increase the prize money.
Tiger Woods announced his arrival on the global scene when he triumphed at the 1997 Masters by a record breaking 12 strokes. Since then, he has won 70 more PGA titles including 13 more majors. His reign at the top of the Official World Golf Rankings has virtually been unchallenged. His dominance of the sport has been super natural. He is clear of Phil Mickelson (World No. 2 golfer) by a mammoth margin (15.20 for Tiger vs 8.54 for Mickelson). He has spent over 570 weeks at the top with over 260 consecutive weeks as World No. 1 golfer. Amongst other accolades Tiger has been…
* The youngest golfer to achieve the career Grand Slam
* The youngest golfer to win 50 tournaments on tour
* PGA Player of the Year a record 10 times
* PGA Tour Player of the Year a record 9 times
* PGA Tour Money Leader a record 9 times
* Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year a record 2 times
* Associated Press’s Male Athlete of the Year a record 4 times
* And lest we forget, the richest and highest paid sportsperson ever and the first to break the $ 1 Bn dollar mark.
And as far as the personal brand is concerned, Tiger Woods was squeaky clean, articulate, philanthropist and a picture perfect family man. He was everything that was never there before. He was the embodiment of the value and virtue system that every marketeer cherished for. For marketeers, he was surreal but amazingly true. He was everything that men wanted to be, women wanted their men to be like, kids wanted to grow up to be and mothers wanted their sons to grow into.
Brands were desperate to hedge their success on him. A great consistent performer and a revered icon of athleticism, Tiger Woods delivered high performance every time he entered the arena. Top brands like Nike, AT&T, General Motors’s Buick, American Express, Electronic Arts, Tag Heuer, Pepsico’s Gatorade and most notably Accenture received personification from Tiger Woods. While these brands were witnessing mass hysteria and reaping tremendous recall and subsequent profits by associating with him, Tiger’s annual kitty swelled to over $100 mn thanks to these multi-year, multi-million dollar endorsement deals.
So much was his pre-eminence on the endorsees that even the casual roving eye would notice Nike apparel in an Accenture, Gatorade or Tag Heuer commercial, a GM Buick badge on his Nike golf bag etc. These ostensible violations would never have been tolerated in case of any other celebrity. But for Tiger Woods, all these were permitted and advertisers never objected to the presence of other brands in their advertising campaigns. Whether this was out of compulsion or choice, all the brands associated with Tiger Woods benefited massively in absolute and intangible forms.
Brand extensions and campaigns were conjured around him. Accenture’s “Go on. Be a Tiger.”…Gatorade’s “Tiger” variant…Gillette’s “Phenom” & “Champion” series…etc. are the most distinguished and recalled instances.
Amidst all this, when he couldn’t put a foot wrong, came this mother of all facades. The almost super human self assuredness, discipline and restraint that he displayed on the course and off it otherwise was all a sham. The average individual has sensed that this God has flaws and the media is thirsty for blood.
While most other brands have other celebs as well on their roster, Accenture is the worst hit. Tiger Woods is everywhere, where Accenture is. On television, hoardings, airport lounges, magazines, websites, conferences, etc. My friends in Accenture tell me that even their office stationery, presentation templates, office cafeteria etc. have Tiger Woods in some form or the other.
Accenture was nobody till Tiger Woods was roped in. Most consumers had no idea about or inclination to know Accenture. Even the radical “Go on…Be a Tiger…” campaign said minimum about what Accenture did and whom it was meant for. The campaign seemed to be extolling Tiger Woods than anything else. However, much to the dismay of the purist marketeers and advertisers, this campaign was a huge success and brought a consulting firm into our living rooms and the topic of luncheon discussions. Such was the aura of Tiger Woods.
In retrospection, this has turned out into a classic marketing folly – one that will achieve case study status in most B-schools. Critics are questioning Accenture and Young & Rubicam’s (the agency accredited with creating the Accenture campaign) wisdom of resting their entire corporate identity on a single individual. They have thrown a cautionary tale about how risky it is for marketeers and advertisers to hinge their marketing efforts on one celebrity.
Michael Phelps was endorsing Kellogg when he was photographed piping pot and Kobe Bryant too featured in Nutella & McDonald’s campaigns when he was accused of sexual assault. These brands were quick to sack the disgraced stars. But the case with Accenture is totally different. Although Accenture has ended its six year relationships with Tiger Woods, it has a mountain to climb before it can establish some semblance in post Tiger Woods campaigns.
Although Phil Knight, Chairman of Nike has whole heartedly supported Tiger Woods through this, the unraveling of this crisis couldn’t have been worse for Nike as well, which has built its entire golf business that generates around $650 mn a year in revenue around Tiger Woods. Akin to Accenture, Nike Golf is Tiger Woods and there is no better time than Christmas & New Year to sell golf kits.
The other brands are just waiting for the current storm to settle down before deciding their next course of action. It just took one freakish accident to convert Tiger Woods from a respected cynosure into staple hay for David Letterman, Conan O’brien, radio jockeys, commentators, critics and the like. The expected stereotypes with “I told you so…” seem to be coming out by the hour.
Tiger Woods didn’t do a favor on himself by staying mute initially and then by issuing ambiguous statements. The more distressing aspect here is that a celebrity of his stature didn’t have a good PR / crisis management team to help him with this disaster. In this era of user generated content and social media, where each individual on the net is an author, publisher, opinion shaper, crowd puller, the gospel for personal branding is honesty and transparency. The least he could have done is admit his misdemeanor and seek redemption.
Instead he relied on unclear blog posts like "Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn't have to mean public confessions," and "This is a private matter and I want to keep it that way. Although I understand there is curiosity, the many false, unfounded and malicious rumors that are currently circulating about my family and me are irresponsible."
Consumerism is perception. These coming from Tiger Woods were bound to make the average individual more inquisitive and his endorsees queasy and unsure as to what stance to take. I thought I would include some startling statistics just to exemplify how the brand Tiger Woods and the brands he endorsed have plummeted:
* Zeta Interactive, a digital ad agency that monitors message boards, blogs and social media posts, said positive sentiment toward Tiger Woods had already crashed. Before the accident, buzz about the golfer was 91 % positive. In a week, that figure had sunk to 43 %.
* Prior to the controversy, when Tiger Woods was featured in a TV ad, sponsors on average saw a 16% higher recall of the commercial itself, along with a 22% higher brand recall, and a 39% higher net likability when compared to ads from those brands that did not feature Tiger Woods. All these figures have got slashed to single digits.
* Data from a Nielsen Buzzmetrics Brand Association Map analyzed language in online chatter centered around Tiger Woods and found that prior to the scandal, adjectives like “Great,” “Good,” and “Best” dominated along with other sports-related terms. But scanning conversations 10 days after, words like “Voicemail,” “Mistress,” and “Affair” drowned out all positive or neutral commentary.
* The Nielsen IAG unit of the Nielsen Co. found that his infidelities affected the brands Tiger Woods sells. There were more than 20 instances through Monday, Dec. 7, of jokes being made on late-night talk shows that paired Tiger Woods with one of his sponsors by name, according to Nielsen IAG. The recall among viewers of the brand mentioned in the joke was 55 percent, according to Nielsen IAG, compared with a norm in late-night shows of 39 percent. About 11 percent of those viewers who recalled a brand with ties to Tiger Woods said they had a negative opinion of the brand, Nielsen IAG reported, compared with the average negative opinion of a brand mentioned in a late-night show of 6 percent.
* In a survey by business conference organizer Argyle Executive Forum this week, more than 75 percent of marketing professionals polled said they would curtail endorsement relationships with Tiger Woods if they had such deals in place.
* Around 20 website addresses like TigersHarem.com, TigerGotWood.com, TigersLitter.com, TigerTexts.com, TigerLies.com, TigerWoodsLies.com and 2TimingTiger.com, are currently on sale on eBay for a cumulative price totaling to over 100 million dollars. The most expensive amongst these is being sold at 21 million dollars.
* The Sydney Morning Herald reported that TAG Heuer has ordered stores in Australia to remove advertising posters that featured Tiger Woods.
* UK bookies were offering four to one odds that Tiger Woods and his wife will divorce and three to one that Gillette will pull Tiger Woods from advertisements.
Despite all this, we are forgetting one very vital aspect. And that is; Tiger Woods is a golfer par excellence. He has made the rest of the field look absolutely pedestrian for more than a decade. While he was indulging in transgressions, his sport never suffered. The sport has only benefited from him. If he manages to salvage his family life and put together everything behind him, he can once again be the force to be reckoned with.
We all love underdogs and eulogize stories of resurrection. Will golf get its prodigal son back??
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