The front page of the business section of the New York Times ran a piece by Tim Arango called “Big Risk in a Brand of One Man” that takes the view that there is too much risk defining your brand with an individual you cannot control. Obviously the piece centered around Tiger Woods and the sponsors of his that have stayed, and those who have taken a different tack.
While I understand the opinion Mr. Arango takes from an academic perspective, I think the events that have unfolded just in the past few weeks tell a different story, which is that even when things go very badly with a brand tied to one man, that by itself makes brand management even simpler.
In the book Rethink, I spend a great deal of time talking about how to quantify where there is, and isn’t value in your organization, and a big part of that is being clear about what is most valuable to your customers, partners, and employees. Why do they choose to work with you and buy your goods and services, what will cause them to leave, and how will you draw new customers?
So how is bad news a good thing for brand? Obviously the Tiger Woods case is on the largest of global stages right now, but even on smaller more localized stages I think we would see the same things happening:
1) When a bad thing makes news, organizations have to decide if they have the right spokesperson and make a statement along those lines.
2) Because the story is already news, the statement itself becomes news, maybe even bigger news than the ad campaign itself. Just in the past two days, two sponsors of Woods, Gillette and Accenture shifted their marketing plans based on Woods’s recent news. The Gillette and Accenture news each made the front page of The New Tork Times – something advertising money almost cannot buy.
3) Whether it’s local news or global news like the Tiger Woods story, organizations have the opportunity to add clarity to their marketing message. Nike is sticking with Woods for now because they are simply about sports and off the field activities aren’t really core to their message (which makes sense to me). I didn’t even know that Gillette had a relationship with Woods (which they have kept for now) so that was great exposure for them, and in the case of Accenture who dropped them, I understand that decision as well, and Arango’s article does a very good job of explaining what Accenture views as its brand strengths and why Tiger Woods is no longer the right representative for that message. “Since most consumers have no idea what a company like Accenture does, Mr. Woods became the human face of the corporation and a means to extol the corporate virtues of performance and risk-taking.”
So why is it such a good thing to have brand tied to a single person, as in the case of Accenture? Unlike a team made up of many people (such as a Tour de France team), when one person does something inconsistent with the brand message, it is very easy to come out and make that statement and be clearer to the target audience with respect to why the person is or is not going to be dropped.
“In a statement Sunday, [Accenture] said Mr. Woods, 34, was “no longer the best representative” for its advertising.”
I believe that in the long run this will serve to further strengthen the brand of Accenture because they have been so clear about why Tiger’s actions are inconsistent with their brand. The Accenture move also signifies that they didn’t just pick Tiger because he was so famous, there were specific things that they felt were core to their brand that he represented (again, see Arango’s article).
So bad news for a brand is in many cases a great opportunity to further clarify what the message of the organization is so they can be that much clearer to their targets about what their message is, and isn’t.
-Ric
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