Mid-Michigan readers can hear Rick Cole every Wednesday at approximately 6:35 a.m. on Lansing radio station WILS 1320’s “am Lansing” program hosted by Walt Sorg.

What Would Tiger Do?

by Richard Cole
December 16, 2009

Ambassador Nancy Brinker told the recent graduating class at MSU that she founded the Susan G. Komen Fund to support research on the cure for breast cancer after her sister “Suzie” died of breast cancer. That was nearly 30 years ago.

This year, President Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Honor, and MSU President Simon gave her a doctorate. It’s a big deal to get a Presidential Medal of Honor. And it’s harder to get an honorary doctorate than it is to get a real one.

A couple of weeks ago, Ben Tanzer, social marketing guru with Prevent Child Abuse America, spoke to MSU’s conference on Consumer Culture and the Ethical Treatment of Children. His dream is to create a Susan G. Komen Fund to fight child abuse. Organizations, like people, can, and should, have role models. Suzie Komen wasn’t a celebrity, but the organization named after her sure has become one. Organizations can be celebrities.

Communities can be celebrities too. I visited a celebrity community in China in 1984. We were taken to see a farm that was part of a grand community experiment in free-market economics. Farmers there earned bonuses for the extraordinary production of this experimental farm.

The free market was producing great prosperity for the community, but not for the reason we thought. Standing next to one of the four or five buses that had unloaded visitors to the farm, our interpreter took me aside and leaned over. “Don’t believe everything you see here,” he said. “See that row of portable toilets over there? We needed to bring them in because we have so many visitors here. The workers dump them out in the vegetable fields at night.”

Community celebrities — just like any other kind of celebrity — are not always what they seem. In 1986, America’s beef promotion council hired an ad agency with a great idea: let’s get a couple of celebrities to help us sell more beef. That’s how a Hollywood starlet named Cybill Shepherd got hired along with Rockford’s James Garner to promote beef eating in America.

Trouble for the folks at the beef council was they didn’t find this out until they read it in The New York Times — Cybill was a vegetarian. A couple of weeks later, Rockford had the big one, and had to get his chest cracked for a triple bypass. Celebrity endorsements are dangerous — unless you can hire Ernie Harwell or Mother Teresa.

I never liked Nike much. First, nothing they had was good enough to justify the sweat shops in Central America and Southeast Asia that, so the story goes, made most of their overpriced stuff. I was playing golf at a Detroit country club a dozen or so years ago and teased my caddie (as I am inclined to do), a bright, young, African American kid with shiny-new Nike sneakers. In a stage whisper, almost like an ad jingle, I sang (hear: nahnah, nah nahnah): “You’re wearing Nike sneakers…made in a Vietnamese sweat shop.” Without skipping a beat, my young friend hummed back: “This sweaty seventh grader from Detroit…is carrying your 30-pound golf bag.” That still makes me wince.

Now I turn on the TV and see 40 or 50 African American kids standing on a driving range. “Integrity, honesty and commitment,” or words like those flash across the screen as Tiger Woods gives his First Tee Foundation kids a swing lesson with his glass iron. And I wonder, how many American kids now aspire to become a celebrity like Tiger so they can do a mattress mambo with a porn star or two?

Maybe Tiger will end his once-wonderful career doing a commercial about what it’s like to bring a case of AIDS home to his wife? What are the odds he’ll admit that he forgot to tell these kids that they need to know this: celebrities and their Cadillacs are not always what they are cracked up to be.

Richard Cole is professor and chairperson of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing at Michigan State University. The opinions expressed reflect his individual viewpoint and not that of the university.