I recently learned that one of Usain bolt’s major sponsors, Puma, considered dropping him after his less than impressive performance at the 2004 Athens Olympics. Some of us who have been following Track and Field and Usain Bolt’s career will remember his running the 200m at the Athens Olympics when he pulled up out of the race.
Of course Puma is a world renowned shoe company so therefore they need winners to promote their brand. After the 2004 Olympics it was clear that at that moment Bolt was not a winner. Puma had been sponsoring bolt since 2002 and of course the sponsorship of any athlete by any company is an investment and we all hope to get returns on our investments. The benefit for puma was of course that Bolt would have blown up and as a result they would be selling shoes like crazy.
However, that did not happen as soon as they would have liked and they were having second thoughts. But as the popular Jamaican saying goes, “wa no ded no kaal it dopi’. In this case, this simply means that we should not easily give up on people.
What would have happened if Puma had given up on Bolt in 2004? They would not have sold so many sneakers after Bolt won the 100m in Beijing 2008 and took off his spikes, which apparently was a signal to tell people to go buy shoes from Puma.
According to jamaicanmusic.com, Jochen Zeitz the former CEO of Puma told CNBC, “he would have “bitten” himself if he had actually stopped sponsoring Bolt.”
There is a lesson to be learnt from this story. That is that we are sometime too quick to give up. We expect to reap immediate benefits from our investments. We do not want to wait the long haul for the immeasurable rewards that are to come.
It took Puma all of 6 years to collect their reward for sticking by a struggling Bolt. They have been benefitting in a major way for 5 years now and one might argue that what they got in return in 2008 alone far exceeded what they spent in all those 6 years combined.
