When a company chooses to take on a celebrity to promote and sponsor their company, they are taking a huge gamble in general. In Chapter 11, KD Paine talks about the importance of building, maintaining and protecting your brand’s reputation. All it takes is one little thing to de-rail and ruin a brand’s reputation nowadays. Look at the Tiger Woods scandal that occurred in 2009. Woods was regarded as a “family man”, a great ambassador for a brand and someone that people could look up to. Then news of affairs came to light and several huge sponsorship deals got dropped immediately. Big names like AT&T, Gatorade, Tag Heuer, and General Motors immediately dropped Woods’ face and name from all their campaigns because they didn’t want their good brand names associated with his bad decisions. When a company signs on a celebrity to endorse their product, they have no idea what may happen in the future. It could really go either way: it could be horrible for a company and have a situation like Tiger’s or it could be a good situation where your celebrity gets the spotlight for something positive and does good things for your brand. It’s all a gamble with celebrity endorsements. Is your company’s brand name and reputation worth the risk?

Photo: By Author