sreekanth
Companies put a huge amount of time, money and effort into building up their brand, especially how their values are reflected in their brand. Think about the visual richness and consistency of some of the best known consumer brands like Victoria's Secret (it's all about being sexy) to Apple (truly awesome products).
But when you tie your brand to a human celebrity you take on the risk of their human frailties as well as the powerful association consumers feel to the celebrity -- and so to the product being hawked.
The current celebrity crisis Tiger Woods finds himself in has to be a living nightmare for Accenture. They chose Tiger Woods as their aspirational image not for a consumer product but for the transformative and extremely expensive consulting services they provide to companies.
Since 2003 Accenture has made Tiger Woods the basis of their advertising - with bill boards and print ads so pervasive you can't have missed them. The ads are about values - the quality of Tiger Woods' skill and character as an analogy for the quality of Accenture services.
When the Tiger Woods scandal first broke several of his sponsors made statements that they would stand by their man (not unlike the classic view of the stoic suffering wife standing next to her man as he admits his infidelities as so many of our politicians have done recently). And as recently as yesterday the WSJ reported that his sponsors were standing firm and that Accenture was still featuring Tiger on their web site - but today is a new day.
Today Accenture started to pull references to Tiger Woods and related ad images off it's web site (Bloomberg). As you navigate the site now searching for Tiger many of the pages come back with the message:
"We're sorry, the page you requested can't be found on www.accenture.com."
I can just imagine the frantic web site developers taking down pages but not having the time to repair all the links or remove them from the site search index. It's a very public way of pulling support without saying anything - and tacky too. Given the focus the Accenture values page puts on relationship and integrity I would have hoped they would be more classy about it and at least make a professional statement, hopefully developed with Tiger Woods, before hacking up their web site - do they imagine that they can remove the association? No surely not - their ad campaign was simply too successful.
The irony is that the top search result for "Tiger" on the Accenture site is a page headed by:
"At a time when it's tougher than ever to be a Tiger, it's even more crucial to know what it takes"
No question it's tougher than ever to be Tiger Woods - and how tough will depend of whether he can salvage his image, his sponsors, his family and his golf game. Maybe this ad says it all.
Posted in: sports
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