INNOVATE THIS:WHAT IS the Rory McIlroy brand? Recently, the golfer dumped his agent of several years, Andrew "Chubby" Chandler, in favour of Conor Ridge, who runs Horizon Sports Management, based in Dublin.
One reason offered by McIlroy for this change was he felt greater work needed to be done on his personal brand. In one telling sentence, the young player told reporters that he had been impressed with how Ridge had handled G-Mac’s commercial dealings. For the uninitiated, G-Mac is the personal brand of fellow Ulsterman and US Open winner, Graeme McDowell.
The decision will cost Chandler many millions of euro over the course of the next decade – 20 per cent of Rory McIlroy’s commercial income is a big hit for anyone. But there is a question hanging over the “McIlroy brand” that the new man at the helm must answer sooner, rather than later. What does it stand for?
To be clear, McIlroy is now famous in a way that very, very few golfers are famous among the non-golf playing public. The player recently signed the biggest sponsorship deal of his career, underlining his new position as one of the world’s most valuable sports stars. He is being paid several million euro to promote Santander UK, Britain’s fifth-biggest high-street bank, and will feature in advertising alongside the company’s other brand ambassadors, the two British Formula 1 world champions, Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button.
Would you recognise him from his passport photo? That is a test that agents often use to determine whether their clients could carry a brand campaign. Without the visual clues of their usual sporting kit, would your mother know who he was? Tiger Woods would pass this test with flying colours. So did Seve Ballesteros. Arnold Palmer’s fame is such that he is still one of the 10 biggest-earning golfers in the world, some 40 years after he last contended in a major. Now we can add McIlroy to that list.
This is significant in terms of his price tag. Most golfers are able to sell golf clubs, balls, shoes and apparel, but not bank accounts. For this reason, the Santander deal is a watershed moment.
It’s worth noting that this level of stardom is not just about winning. Rory is not famous in the US for winning the US Open. He’s famous for losing the Masters, then winning the US Open. It sounds like a little thing, but it’s the difference between a statistic and a story. And he didn’t just lose; he was exposed in the most painful, naked way. Golf does that to people. Up and down, up and down: the ad men love a “narrative”, their favourite new word.
“There are two ways to commercialise an athlete,” says Phil de Picciotto, president of athletes and personalities at sports marketing agency Octagon. “You either sell stardom or the anticipation of stardom.”
In this way, a big part of McIlroy’s appeal is hope – but, as Barack Obama has found, this is a valuable but perishable commodity.
This is relevant because any talk of McIlroy the brand is alienating because we don’t like brands, we like people. We also feel a bit silly for buying in to the whole Tiger Woods brand that was built and sustained over more than a decade, one in which he became the most commercially valuable athlete in the world.
The problem was the gap between the perception and reality. “Brands should never be built with the intention of fooling the audience,” says de Picciotto. “People are too smart for that. That gap created a risk that over time became exposed very dramatically.”
We don’t want to talk too formulaically about McIlroy, he says. “He has a brand but we don’t talk about it in terms of crass commercial way we did about Tiger.”
There’s a conundrum at the heart of Brand Rory. We warm to him because he’s talented and normal. His values seem to be those we share ourselves. In short, we like him.
The problem is that famous people, even the nice ones, are not normal. It’s just not possible to earn tens of millions, be known around the world and live like the rest of us. We, the general public, won’t allow it.
Already, McIlroy has moved from his home in Holywood, Co Down, because the attention he was getting was too much. He split up with his childhood sweetheart and is going out with Caroline Wozniacki, the world’s number one tennis player. Every move takes him away from the “normal guy” persona that is central to his appeal.
The 24/7 news media has begun to look for any signs of petulance and will be quick to write stories when they perceive McIlroy is exhibiting brat-like tendencies. Note the reporting of his post-Open interview when he complained about the rain. Or his “Twitter spat” with commentator Jay Townsend.
I once asked Chubby Chandler about this potential conflict, and he said: “If we do it well, he’ll end up being Rory McIlroy – not a marketing property.”
It’s a job he didn’t get to finish.