Tiger Wood’s recent problems are not just personal in nature.  For his sponsors, including Accenture and Nike, Tiger’s widely publicized domestic scandal represents a significant risk to their brands; a risk they have mitigated in very different ways.

Accenture recognized the risk and acted decisively by dropping Tiger from their corporate advertisements not long after the scandal hit the news. According to the New York Time’s columnist Roger Cohen, this drastic and presumably difficult decision has yielded some positive results. Cohen argues that the Accenture advertisements featuring Wood’s were becoming a little too familiar:

The ads, which rolled out in January, are playful, clever, compelling — and without Woods’ infidelities we’d still be staring at him in a bunker. Makes you think. I asked Alex Pachetti, senior director for communications at Accenture, about lessons learned. He e-mailed me: “Have a plan in place for potential scenarios. Gather facts to make the decision. Take swift action.” Sounds simple. But it’s not.

In other words, the Accenture guy is saying one has to be prepared for the worst – but complacency is a difficult tendency to overcome. Cohen goes on to argue that companies suffer from management inertia and that difficult and disruptive events can have positive consequences. He compares Accenture’s situation with that of the US auto industry that failed to notice that the market was changing its views about its gas-guzzling motors until it found itself in a “great big hole.” His conclusion is that Woods did Accenture a favour by “tossing his little grenade and getting Accenture to turn on a dime” and reinvent its image.

Nike, another of Tiger’s major sponsors took quite a different tack. Maintaining its reputation of standing by its representatives through their difficulties, Nike retained Woods through his troubles.  At this time, when Woods is doing what he does best at the USA Master’s Tournament, Nike are running a controversial advertisement featuring Tiger’s somewhat emotionless face with his deceased father’s voice heard in the background. There has been mixed reactions to the ad which some consider distasteful and exploitative – which goes to show that picking a path out of a public relations crisis is no easy task.

The Accenture option can be seen as a callous business decision to dump Tiger or it can be seen as a sensible move that enabled it to take a new direction with its corporate image – what Cohen calls the benefit of “creative churn.” Nike, on the other hand, took a risk on Tiger and while standing by its man is a noble and laudable action by a corporation, they have not successfully found a way to position their brand using the “new” Tiger. The lesson we can extract from Tiger’s sponsorship saga maybe that caution and fall-back positions are increasingly important in our volatile times – but they have to be carefully weighed so as to yield the desired result. No corporation would want their decision on risking Tiger to be seen as risking the business.