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Even before Tiger announced yesterday that he was taking time off from the Tour to work on repairing his marriage, the vaunted Tiger Woods Inc endorsement empire appears to be imploding.  Quietly, without any fanfare or public announcements of any kind, starting on November 29, advertisements featuring Woods vanished from the airwaves.  While he received the vocal and not too surprising support of Nike, no other major company with whom he has an endorsement deal has committed to maintaining a relationship, at least publicly.

In fact, he has disappeared from the website of Accenture, a company which had called him the "centerpiece" of its advertising campaign.  Indeed, large Accenture ads featuring Tiger can be found in most major airports.

Meanwhile, in Australia, Tag Heuer, the watch company, has pulled all of its advertisements featuring Woods, although the company claims it is unrelated to the recent activities.  That claim might be more believable if the campaign had been in use for, say, six months or more; but the in-store placards had only recently been distributed.  In addition, AT&T has announced that it re-evaluate its relationship.

Gillette, has announced that it will limit Tiger's role in its marketing while he is on hiatus.  That means, given that Gillette is a Proctor & Gamble company, his role with Gillette is at an end.  P&G is not going to jeopardize its main market, women, by keeping an endorsement with a serial adulterer.

An early example of how far, how fast he has fallen comes from the Davie Brown Index, which is a measure of a celebrity's ability to influence shoppers.  Tiger dropped from number 6 before the car accident to number 24.  With more of his endorsements going away by the day, expect that number to drop further.

For companies, Tiger Woods is yet one more cautionary tale about the inherent danger of celebrity endorsers.  Market positioning of your product is critical and when a celebrity endorser goes off the rails, as it were, an entire campaign comes crashing down around him or her.  As Tiger proves, even the most focused and straight-laced appearing people can be hiding secrets that can devastate a company.  In Tiger's case, almost all of his deals are with large companies that can afford to absorb whatever the blowback might be, but certainly that is not always the case and one needs to be hyper-vigilant for those situations in which the misdeeds of a single individual can lead to a disastrous quarter, year or worse for a company you are invested in, work for or manage.

It is not a completely hopeless situation from Tiger's standpoint.  Regardless of how his efforts to save his marriage turn out, the public fickle affections, and with them his endorsement contracts, can always return.  For proof of that one need only ask Kobe Bryant, who faced a much swifter and more complete drop by his companies following a rape allegation, but has since returned to where his endorsement income is at a level close to what it would have been in the absence of the Colorado incident.  In Tiger's case, it may take a couple of years of laying low and doing little but winning golf tournaments, especially majors, without being seen as an endorser for a year or two, while anger about these revelations blows over.  Then, he can reap the benefit of what all good athletes fundamentally know: winning cures everything.

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