By Bert Zethof

The Tiger Woods debacle has shown that the best marketing is your own marketing.

Trends in effective marketing highlight the importance of being authentic, transparent, and honest with your customers. It's about building long term relationships based on permission marketing - having the customer's permission at each step of the way to offer something of value in return for their attention.

Like dating, the worse thing you can do is surprise the customer. If you do, permission is lost.

Tiger lost permission. And it's costing him, and the companies he endorses, big time. One report has him dropping from the sixth most valuable celebrity endorser to 24th, virtually overnight (based on the Davie Brown Index).

If you think about it, linking the identity of your business to a virtual stranger (even though he/she is a celebrity)is nonsensical. You can do all the background research you want, but you can never be sure about their character or loyalty.

Unless the endorser is immersed in your company, he/she can never be one of your family. He/she does not have your business as part of their DNA. They cannot communicate with authenticity. Moreover, your company is always at risk of a skeleton coming out of the closet. In Tiger's case ten skeletons and counting.

Your own people can do a lot of meaningful marketing with $60 million (the approximate value of Tiger's deal with Nike) and you can feel confident that you're building customer relationships that last.