Go on, be a tiger

I can’t help but to feel a bit of shadenfreude when corporations use celebrities to market their services, and then something like the Tiger Woods incident happens. In the New York Times today, an article details some companies who have used the face of Woods to be their “brand”.

Accenture, the giant consulting firm, ended its six-year marketing relationship with Tiger Woods on Sunday, showing once again that in advertising as in sports, there are no sure things.

Mr. Woods had been featured in Accenture campaigns with the tagline, “Go On. Be a Tiger,” splashed in business magazines and airport waiting rooms since 2003. 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.

It strikes me as absurd that a company like Accenture pays millions of dollars in advertising and marketing, and their message is something so ridiculous as “Go On. Be a Tiger.” I can imagine the countless boardroom meetings with the Marketing big shots mulling over again and again what their “brand image” will be, how much money they’ll spend (millions), and what clever sound-bite they’ll use to best represent an signify their corporation.

And there you have the final product of all that deliberation, creativity, and all of those advanced business degress: a portrait of a philandering golfer with the tag-line “Go On. Be a Tiger.”

Brilliant.