Controversy as an Abandoning Point? RE: Controversy as a Selling Point

For this week’s post, I am choosing to respond to my friend Graeme Law’s post called “Controversy as a Selling Point” (of course sticking to my trend of talking about sports, but not baseball this time).  Before we get started, I have to say that Graeme is a fantastic writer.

anorak.co.uk

Here we go now.  So we all know what happened in the Tiger Woods fiasco, and that’s partially my point.  Tiger Woods still remains a social reference figure (whether aspirational or dissociative is up to you to figure) in not just our society, or even continent, but literally our world today.  Graeme also mentioned that pre-fiasco, Woods was endorsed by quite a respectable number of companies, and post-fiasco (I seem to love that word–fiasco and conundrum, both great words), Nike remained the only company that would continue to sponsor him.

It goes without saying, that if companies thought that continuing to sponsor Woods would skew their sales in a harmful way, than it makes sense for them to drop the sponsorship.  But what exactly are they doing by dropping the sponsorship?  From a marketing stretch, the sponsoring companies had built a sustainable competitive advantage by sponsoring Woods–he is the only Tiger Woods in the world (pretty sustainable, huh?), and, who at that time was an aspirational social reference figure for many people, not just golfers. What does that say about the other companies?  That they looked at their sponsorship from a transactional orientation point of view?  Perhaps…

chad59.wordpress.com

With all the titles he has won, he added a supreme amount of value to his name, and companies’ willingness to pay for his marketing was through the roof.  He helped many companies expand globally, and was an icon for millions of people.  It’s scary how things can change so quickly.

-Faiz