Tiger’s Brand: 80 Days Past Its Sell-By Date
Tiger Woods has finally spoken in public, 80 days after going into seclusion when it was dramatically disclosed that he was cheating on his wife with many women … as many as a dozen mistresses. I cannot help but compare how the brand and reputation of a public corporation might have faired had it remained completely silent and unresponsive for 80 days following a major crisis. Woods, too, is a major corporation.
Watching Woods for a while during his televised “apology,” I was struck by how scripted and disingenuous he appeared and sounded. He was just words, read off paper. I wondered how many attorneys and agents had screenwriting credits.
As we all know, the televised Tiger Woods event was tightly managed and controlled. All the people chosen to be in the room had a stake in reporting nothing but moderately okay stories about the golfer.
But public reaction may not be so kind. Longtime CBS Sports reporter Jim Nance reported from an airport while changing planes that he saw people snickering as Woods spoke and making sarcastic comments.
Celebrity attorney Gloria Allred perhaps best described the Tiger Woods televised apology as a “staged public relations stunt.” (Allred, for the record, represents at least two of the golfer’s alleged 12 mistresses.)
I don’t know anything more about the whole episode than anyone else … but I do know that in today’s information world, no brand can hope to survive by remaining closed off, out of sight and unresponsive. Woods is a public brand, and as such, has responsibilities to his public … more than his responsibilities to the business of golf. I think he has gotten bad counsel and waited too long.
Category: Featured, Reputation management
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- uberVU - social comments | February 22, 2010
Tiger seems unaware that he is a corporation; I listened (did not watch) his apology and your words “how scripted and disingenuous he appeared and sounded” described my reaction precisely.
Tiger would have done well to take advice from Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” when Carnegie rightly taught, “When you’re wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.”
I did not watch it, but I was under the impression that he already apologized to the public and I remember because there was some buzz about his Biblical choice of words. From the little I gathered this weekend, I thought he was making a plea to the media to leave his family alone. Did he make two public apologies then?
Whatever the case, it certainly was a media stunt, he’ll be back on the green in no time and pretty soon everybody will be saying that it doesn’t matter what he does in his personal life, just like Clinton.
What’s sad about this story is the trouble you can get into when you become the brand yourself, and how risky that is. A corporation has much bigger shoulders to absorb the blows for bad behavior than does an individual, no matter how rich or protected. Especially if that individual has to come out into public view at some point, or lose the brand entirely.