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Armstrong Debacle: Are Celebrities too Risky for Brands?

Once again, brands that thought they could borrow some magic from a celebrity find themselves swimming in confusion and controversy, like poor Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice . From  AdAge : Within hours, Mr. Armstrong's endorsement empire fell apart as Anheuser-Busch, Trek, Easton-Bell Sports, 24-Hour Fitness, Honey Stinger, Oakley and other firms dumped the cancer survivor, even as some pledged to continue support of his Livestrong Foundation. Nike's livid. The US Postal Service is dismayed. I'm not at all surprised. Celebrity endorsements are a double-edged sword for brands. When the celebrity is hot and you're slicing the competition into prosciutto, life is good. When the celebrity trips and the brand falls on that sword, well, not so good. The foibles of even the most upright-seeming celebrities are eventually exposed and magnified by social media and the Internet, association with stars is a minefield for brands. Eventually someone's ...
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Consequences of Culture: How the blinkered focus on numbers is destroying financial services brands

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“You should resign. You should give back the money you took while this scam was going on and you should be criminally investigated.” Ouch. Imagine if that was a public official leveling such a charge at you, the CEO of a heretofore well-respected financial services institution. Think of the damage done, not only to your personal reputation, but to the brand value of your company and the morale of your people. Yet this is exactly what John Stumpf, CEO of venerable Wells Fargo Bank, had to endure at the hands of Senator Elizabeth Warren this week. This Senate hearing came on the heels of a scandal in which bank employees, under reportedly intense pressure to cross-sell products to make their numbers, fraudulently opened new accounts for customers without their permission. To make matters worse, Stumpf appeared to blame the proverbial “few bad apples” for the trouble, although it appears as though the number of apples fired as a result was somewhere north of 5,000 and none of them, oddly...
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Retail Revival? Not Likely.

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Now that the tinsel and mistletoe dust have settled, let's take stock of the near future for retail advertising. According to Calculated Risk , December retail sales were down .3% from November on a seasonally adjusted basis, but up 5.4% YoY from December 2008. This graph shows retail sales since 1992. This is monthly retail sales, seasonally adjusted (total and ex-gasoline). Click here for larger chart. Retail appears to have bottomed, and should begin a long, slow climb back to better times, although given anemic consumer confidence, that climb could be slower and more arduous than anyone would like, and this includes the retail segment of the advertising industry, whose fortunes have been tracking the industry it serves. A report in Bloomberg News  notes that: Americans also bought more consumer goods, computers and telecommunications equipment from overseas, signaling a revival in overall demand and business investment. But most analysts say that demand is we...
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