The other thing they would have to look at is what their trends were before the Tiger endorsement. If sales had been dropping at a faster rate than they actually did with Tiger, that would indicate that Tiger potentially had helped to minimize the losses. However, the important thing to note here is that if the objective was to increase US sales the Tiger sponsorship did not work.

On another note though, you can see that GM is cutting back on their overall advertising spend. If the authors of What Sticks are correct this will only impact about 15% of their short term sales which they will undoubtedly blame on the economy but the question if GM survives is what does the loss of Tiger do for long term brand awareness and sales? Do you lose the Chinese market, does your average age stop going down and start going up again which would be a huge problem as boomers get past their car buying prime.

Maybe this is rocket science Happy Thanksgiving!