Improve your brand by managing perceptions

Posted on February 5, 2010 by Gary Chow | No Comments » | Trackback URL

‘C’mon, where’s the love!

Watching Lleyton Hewitt play during the recent Aussie Open the thought occurred to me: how come this guy hasn’t appeared in many advertising campaigns in all the time he’s been a top ranked player?

I mean, we are talking about a two-time grand slam championship winner (Wimbledon and US Open), and a player ranked number one for a year and a half in late 2001-02. His record as a player is outstanding. In fact, in the world of Australian tennis over the past three decades, only John Newcombe can lay claim to a superior record.

Hewitt’s record also surpasses that of the other big-time Aus player in recent years, Pat Rafter. Sure, both have won two grand slam titles, but the feisty fist-pumper from Adelaide has won more than twice as many tournaments as the amiable Queenslander.

So how come corporations haven’t been beating a path to Hewitt’s door this past decade? The only TV commercial I can remember him figuring in is one for a brand of toilet paper (and no, I’m not kidding).

I can’t imagine his management declining offers for advertising and sponsorship dollars; after all, here’s a dude who has charged women magazines a motza for exclusive picture rights of his wedding and new born kids, and is notorious for his tendency to sue anyone and anything.

So, what can it be? I reckon one big reason is Hewitt’s negative personal brand. The very qualities that make him a terrific tennis player – intensity, feistiness, and pugnacity – scares people away. The fact that his sportsmanship has been questioned at times during his career would also be a factor. Unlike Rafter, Hewitt is not seen as the type of guy men would like to have a beer with and women would want to take home to meet the parents.

Hewitt’s apparent lack of commercial appeal says a lot about marketing and the concept of branding. A good brand is not simply about quality and accomplishments. It’s not about what is in the product and how the product is built; it’s largely about image and perception.

As a discipline, marketing is fundamentally about managing perceptions and this applies to people as well as products.

The challenge is that negative perceptions are devilishly hard to change. Once developed, they quickly become entrenched. To change an adverse perception companies need make a massive investment in marketing and more often than not that money is wasted. Banks are a case in point. Their attempts to make people see them in a warm and fuzzy light via hugely expensive advertising campaigns simply haven’t made a dent in how the public generally view them.

In Hewitt’s case, he started off on the wrong foot by getting the public offside with his on-court antics when he first joined the pro-tour. Since then he hasn’t been able to change negative perceptions regardless of his many wonderful achievements for self and country.

So, while Rafter parades around in Bonds underwear, appears on billboards, and has a tennis stadium named after him, Hewitt, arguably the superior ‘product’, is largely shunned.