Be like water...or Ronaldo. Just not Coca-Cola.

I'll admit that when I first heard this story I immediately whipped out my phone and typed out a draft post basically hopping on the bandwagon of what every news outlet was saying about Ronaldo's 10-second snub, Coke's $4bn share value loss and the perceived correlation of the two events. To say "personal branding has power!"​, just as vehemently as Ronaldo said "Água!"​. 

In saying that, why wouldn't you believe it? 

Especially when we’ve seen what a tweet from someone like Elon Musk has done to Bitcoin (though granted it is a volatile commodity if you can even call it that) or even the stock price of his own company.

Because short of Kim Kardashian dissing Maybelline in a flippant Instagram story because it didn't match her skin tone. If anyone could make Coke's stock plummet $4bn, Cristiano Ronaldo probably could as a footballing "god"​ that is paid around 6000x more than his average countryman. It's at least plausible.

Now obviously we now know the correlation is hogwash and good on the nerd burgers and sceptics for pulling everyone up on it - you know who you are 😉 and yes you were right. But I guess it shows that the majority of people don’t give a shit about the numbers. Though we obviously should as it's barking up the tree of 'fake news' and we’ve all experienced how dull that chapter was for the Western world. 

Facts aside, I saw a post by Preetham Venkky on LinkedIn about this event and he brought up confirmation bias. That we basically see what we want to see, or believe what we want to believe while avoiding the facts. After reading Preetham's post and having a ponder, I believe what it may come down to, is that we're simply rooting for people to win more than brands, if at all. 

When Whitney Wolfe Herd's (Founder & CEO of Bumble) IPO story was talked about in the same way Ronaldo's snub has been. Becoming the youngest woman to lead a company to IPO was cause for huge celebration. It gave pause for a quiet echo that reverberated into a sentiment of, “Fuck Tinder” given she was a former executive at Tinder.

In saying that, if I bring this back to sport. As children, when we’re introduced to sporting teams, it’s most likely from the influence of our parents, family or school friends. But I don’t remember feeling attached to the team per se. As I was more interested in barracking for my favourite player - be it Johnny Wilkinson of the English Rugby team or Mark Waugh in Australian Cricket among others.

So when you see a world-renowned and revered player doing something that has the potential to pull a faceless brand down a peg, we weirdly want to see that happen or believe it could. This again leads me to think that people are cheering for PEOPLE over brands to win.

However, there are two concrete things I took from this event. The first is that it confirms a personal brand has the power to influence the attention of others for good or bad AND it influences how brands have to react to that individual - to align with, distance themselves or act with decorum. Which to be honest is nothing new events like these are yet to show a remarkable or unprecedented change in a commercial manner like the $4bn headlines suggested. This alone might be the cause for such hype in the first place.

While on the flip side, this event and the conversations that have proceeded it, has shown that salience, in Coca-Cola’s case, plays to the age-old phrase “There is no such thing as bad publicity”. Whichever the case, this had no impact on Coca-Cola's value and market analysis shows it might have actually helped the beverage behemoth. The reason being, there are eyes on Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola is being talked about, especially when Pepsi isn't.

What I do wonder though, is that if the correlation was in fact true and that billions of dollars were slide tackled from under Coca-Cola's legs by the guy that is known to have taken a dive from a tickle. What precedent would that set going forward for brands and would it influence a shift in the power that brands actually have?

To bring this back to a conversation about brands and perhaps your brand. I’ll leave you with this clip from another wild press conference in Greek football. Which could basically sum up a situation like Ronaldo & Coca-Cola, to say that if things like this happen again, the outcome “sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit”. Which in other words means that you can’t plan for unscripted moments like these. So like Bruce Lee says, "Be like water" when it comes to the decisions you make to manage the outcome of a problem. Which is typically what brand management is all about.

Oh, and "drink water" because Ronaldo told you to.

---

Here's a couple of other interesting takes I've seen on this Ronaldo/Coca-Cola ruckus:

Russell Brand - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeSk-7nHwzo

Mark Ritson - https://www.marketingweek.com/mark-ritson-ronaldo-damage-coke-brand/