Public Relations Sports Endorsements Gone Bad

. But what happens when a sports endorsement goes bad? What happens when your athlete has been caught with a hooker, tested positive for steroids or committed a crime?

Then what do you do? Well sometimes you do nothing and simply pull the ads off Television, sometimes you can the athlete and sometimes you make a public statement that you do not condone that activity and this irresponsible behavior is not what we stand for and sack the quarterbacks endorsement big time.

There are so many examples of public relations sports endorsement disasters and then there are super successes with athletes such as; Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Wayne Gretzky, Joe Namath and Magic Johnson. Millions of dollars of products have been sold at very high prices by such companies as Nike, Adidas, L.A. Gear, Wilson sporting goods and Reebok using high-profile athletes and endorsement strategies.

Often when endorsements go bad it can be a public relations short-term nightmare. Other times if the company is quick to act and ax the endorsement; they can put out press releases making them selves look good because they don't stand for that kind of crap. Often they make more money for canning and athlete due to their behavior than they did for endorsing them in the first place. Because as they say in public relations and advertising; all news is good news. Please consider this in both in 2010 and for the future health of you business. The business which stays ahead of the pack will be the business counting the money at the end of the year!

The author is a

B2B Marketing consultant
working for a leading London based company