A surprising number of companies spend some time in the clinic

THE venerable Augusta National Golf Club has been playing host to the Masters Tournament since 1934. But this year it is also playing host to another great drama, the relaunching of the most valuable personal brand in the world. Tiger Woods’s penchant for cocktail waitresses and porn actresses ended up costing an astonishing amount of money: two economists at the University of California, Davis, have calculated that his biggest corporate sponsors, such as Nike and Gatorade, saw as much as $12 billion wiped off the value of their shares in the wake of the scandal. But Mr Woods’s warm reception at Augusta suggests that he is well on his way to recovering his star power.

Brand Tiger is thus likely to join a long list of brands that have come back refreshed after a spell in rehab. These include not just the predictable roster of celebrity brands such as Martha Stewart and Kobe Bryant, but also a surprising number of solid corporate citizens such as Johnson & Johnson and Coca-Cola. Brand-threatening scandals are becoming a regular feature of the corporate landscape, thanks to a toxic mixture of globalisation, which scatters corporate activities hither and yon, and the internet, which allows bad news to spread like wildfire. Oxford Metrica, a consultancy, estimates that executives have an 82% chance of facing a corporate disaster within any five-year period, up from 20% two decades ago. Indeed, just the day after Mr Woods made his return to golf, the American government fined Toyota over $16m for its tardiness in addressing safety concerns. …