To talk or not to talk? That is the question, but with nothing but dodging from Florida, the blogosphere is more than happy to answer.

While Tiger maintains his silence, or his roundabout explanation that fuels guilt and scandal yet explains nothing, has this mega-superceleb squeaky clean sure thing fallen like … like … Kobe and Phelps and Serena and Michael Vick and Britney and Chris Brown and Kanye and … and … well, you get the drift.

Celebrity endorsements mean a big cha-ching for product placement and sales. Celebrities are a brand onto themselves, as corporations are quick to scoop up the good ol’ boys and girls to be their shining star. But who calculates the missteps? What is the cost of damage control — the necessary clean ups in Aisle Life – when the star crashes to earth?  Or into the neighbor’s tree?

Tiger screwed up (or perhaps he didn’t). We don’t know how or why or when or what, but his silence is deafening. And the corporate bigwigs are squirming big time. Buick, Nike, Gatorade, Gillette, TAG Heuer, Accenture, AT&T.  Is this fixable? What’s it going to cost?  What’s plan B for when the best and brightest prove to be all too human? The brands Tiger represents are now running through the “what if” scenarios, praying for a minor character flaw and not a shock and awe to their brand image.

Sure, celebs of yesteryear were only human too. But that was before Twitter, Facebook, TMZ, MySpace, breaking news all night and all day, and with a buzz of a CNN update, dirty laundry is spilled for all to see.

Speak now, Dear Mr. Clean, or others will speak for you. The blogosphere is erupting. If Tiger doesn’t talk, others put words into his mouth and ergo, the mouths of his sponsors. And the many, many customers are just waiting and listening, wallets in hand.

Recently, I had an opportunity to be interviewed by Jim Kukral, one of the top business web experts around.

Some of the questions we covered are:

• What value does your brand bring to your business?
• Does your brand need a tagline?
• Understand the way your brand impacts your customers.
• We discuss just what the definition of a brand is, and its components.
• And, much more…

Click here to listen to “Branding Tips & Secrets To Improve Your Business”.

I had a great “fireside chat” with Tony Parinello the other day. Tony is the author of the best-selling book: “Selling To Vito”

This book is a must read for anyone involved in sales directed towards the CEO, CFO or senior VP management at large firms. Tony’s entire business focus is helping salespeople “sell to VITO.”

Listen in to my interview with Tony to hear about what branding has meant to him – especially in building the very recognizable VITO brand – and hear what you can learn from a master.

Branding starts at the top and lives at the bottom.

What does that mean?

It means that a CEO or senior management might develop and launch a new “brand promise” initiative (the main thing that the company stands for), but it’s the salespeople and customer service people, the employees on the the front line of the organization, who are the ones that ultimately will deliver on that promise.

One of the keys to ensuring a successful launch of a new brand initiative is to make sure that the people who are on front lines of your customer interaction are involved early on with the process. Their input will ensure that you are not making a promise to your customers that you can’t deliver consistently. And, it being part of the process will give your salespeople and customer service people a sense of ownership with the brand promise and will more likely deliver your company’s promise with “on-brand behavior.”

Many branding and marketing books will try to tell you that there’s some secret formula to making your market feel confident in your company’s ability to deliver, but it’s really rather straight-forward.

To win confidence, you simply have to consistently deliver on what ever promise your company or brand makes. Whatever that promise is, you have to consistently be there.

A lot of companies make a lot of plans around a promise – whether it’s Domino’s promise to deliver your pizza 30 minutes or else it is free or J. Crew’s absolutely no-hassle return policy – if you don’t deliver on that promise, it’s going to cost you.

And even with customer service, as a society we have become more demanding in the quality that we expect and the minimum levels of customer service we’re willing to accept. And, as the world gets smaller with Internet communications, companies need to make pure craftsmanship of customer service.

But, it all starts with being consistent.

In my book, Branding Insights for Small Businsses, I used the example of Exxon, the oil company:

which used to be called Esso:

The powers that be at Esso needed to change the company name and they decided to let a computer select the name for them.

They fed the computer some parameters:

• it had to have two syllables
• double consonants
• start with an “E”
• be a name that wasn’t being used throughout the world and
• no meaning in foreign language.

Exxon was supposedly the only word the computer came up with.

I like Exxon because it was the first company that used a computer for naming – or in this instance re-naming – a company.

Although this happened awhile ago, I still find this case study very interesting. And, at least they kept the colors the same!