Ride the Tiger

Tiger Woods to promote Hero Motocorp

John Newman

• JohnNewman
• HeromotoCorp

He's a thirty nine year old golfer whose recent form has suffered because of a serious back injury and surgery. Oh, and he was involved in a whole bunch of scandals that caused his major sponsors to pull the plug on the money pool that was filling up nicely.


We're talking about Tiger Woods who has just been picked by Heromoto Corp, the giant Indian motorcycle company, to promote its brand as it pushes into new markets. It's a lucrative deal over a four year period, said to be between $6 and $8 million a year, and as the aforementioned infidelity stories have encouraged General Motors, AT&T and Gatorade to pull their dollars, this product endorsement will no doubt come as some relief to a sports 'superstar' who is used to counting his bank balance in millions.
The deal was announced last week in Florida at the golf tournament Woods promotes every year, the World Challenge. Now known as the Hero World Challenge.
If this link up might appear, on intial reading, to be a strange move for a motorcycle company, their Chief Exec, Pawan Munjal explained it this way to the Financial Times:
“Hero is going to ride the Tiger. We have this target of making the brand a global brand. So what we need to do is partner and ride on another hugely successful global brand”.
Hero was involved with Honda until around three years ago when they decided to develop their own bikes. It's now India's largest two wheel manufacturer, and their big focus in terms of volume production is on Africa, Central and South America. Growing markets where they introduce their current products.
In terms of entering the more sophisticated and established European and US markets, Munjal says:
“We'll have to do different newer products which are under design and conceptualisation right now – but to the US market we are also looking at taking some of our current products”.  
Now get this! Woods doesn't even ride a motorcycle, and is quoted as saying:
“I don't plan to start now”.
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