July 6, 2010
Metrics
Tiger style
Originally published in NZ Marketing March-April 2010, page 99
Brand association maps allow stakeholders and business executives to quickly understand insights critical to brand health by determining correlations between the brand in question—in this case, Tiger Woods—and a set of associated terms extracted from thousands of online social media conversations.
The words are separated on the map into different categories, as seen in the legend, and the closer a word appears to the leading concept in the centre, the stronger the correlation. In this case, the axes have no relevance. Also, groups of phrases that reside together on the map are placed together for relationship purposes.
Late last November, equity in the previously spotless Tiger Woods mega-brand took an incomprehensible dive following his car accident and the ensuing reports of extramarital affairs. As news continued to fill gossip columns, with increasing online consumer discussion and a correlating decline in Woods’ profile, myriad questions were raised around the true value of multi-million-dollar celebrity endorsement contracts.
Data and analysis extracted from Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics service, which monitors online discussion, reveals that consumer discussion online in New Zealand was virtually non-existent prior to the scandal, but quickly sky-rocketed in the week following the golfer’s car accident (see chart two).
Ads featuring Woods were suspended from US television on 29 November, with consultancy firm Accenture the first sponsor to walk away, followed by telco giant AT&T. Both Gillette and Tag Heuer announced they would stop using images of Woods in their advertising in the short-term and while the endorsement arrangements with games company EA Sports and Nike remain unchanged, Nike’s brand president Charlie Denson said he expects to see a negative impact on the business as a result of the star’s self-imposed exile from the golfing world.
The allegations against Woods posed a substantial dilemma for his sponsors. The biggest concern is the speed with which consumer perceptions can change, in turn impacting brand perceptions (see chart one). The fall out from the Tiger Woods scandal clearly demonstrates that real-time news and social media mean stories of this ilk can take on a snowball effect.
The bottom line? For brands associated with celebrities, it is critically important to keep a constant finger on the pulse of consumer sentiment and, if things go bad, react immediately to limit the impact.