Kylian Mbappé has had quite a week. Real Madrid beat Barcelona in El Clásico, and on Monday night he finished runner-up to Harry Kane at the Ballon d’Or. By Tuesday morning, three Chinese companies had ended their partnerships with him, state broadcaster CCTV had reportedly pulled his adverts and stopped showing his matches, and his accounts on Weibo and Xiaohongshu, each followed by around 1 million people, carried notices saying they had been muted.

The cause was a throwaway answer to a light question. In a behind-the-scenes clip filmed in April for the French online talk show The Bridge, and posted only on Monday, Mbappé was asked about his favourite meme of himself. He described one in which his face had been placed on a man he thought was “a Chinese dictator”. The image was Mao Zedong in his blue suit. Fans have been calling Mbappé a dictator for months, a dig at how completely he dominates the teams he plays for, and memes casting him as assorted autocrats are widely shared.

In China the joke didn’t go down well. Beverage maker Dongpeng, dairy group Mengniu and cheese producer Milkground issued almost identical statements opposing any words or actions that hurt national sentiment. Social platform RedNote, whose content partnership with Mbappé had ended in 2024, said it would remove promotional material. Shares in Dongpeng’s listed parent, Eastroc Beverage, fell as much as 4.1% in Shanghai, and Mengniu dropped about 3% in Hong Kong. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson warned that words offending the Chinese people would meet widespread opposition. Swiss sportswear company On, which signed Mbappé to a roughly 10-year partnership only last month, deleted posts featuring him from its Chinese social media accounts.

On Tuesday Mbappé apologised, calling his comment ill-judged and saying he now understood it had hurt many people in China and in Chinese communities around the world. Spain’s LaLiga issued its own statement of regret.

It made little difference. On Wednesday People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, backed the brands that walked away and warned that once a line is crossed or the public is offended, “all the glamour will quickly dissipate”. China’s foreign ministry said it took the apology seriously, but the state broadcaster said it would judge him by his actions and kept its blackout even after Real Madrid apologised. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Elaine Lai said Mengniu’s sales recovery was unlikely to be derailed, given how quickly it had acted.

Do celebrity ambassadors pay off for brands?

The commercial case for a star ambassador is real. Anita Elberse of Harvard Business School, studying athlete endorsements with Jeroen Verleun, found that signing a star lifted sales by about 4% on average, with a further bump each time the athlete won something big.

The downside is harder to see in advance. When Tiger Woods crashed his car outside his Florida home in November 2009 and the story of his private life unravelled, Christopher Knittel and Victor Stango of UC Davis tracked his sponsors’ share prices. Over 13 trading days those companies lost 2.3% of their market value, somewhere between $5bn and $12bn relative to firms Woods did not endorse. The core sports sponsors, Nike, Electronic Arts and Gatorade owner PepsiCo, fell by more than 4%. Stango suggested the shareholder losses might exceed several decades of Woods’s own endorsement income.

Their paper in Management Science also found that rival companies relying heavily on celebrity endorsements also suffered, as if investors were repricing the risk of the whole practice.

Sudden scandal or slow-burning crisis: what’s the difference?

Gilles Hilary, then a professor at INSEAD and now at Georgetown University, and reputation adviser Leesa Soulodre offered a useful distinction in INSEAD Knowledge. Some crises are what the industry calls cobras: they strike without warning, and due diligence can reduce the risk but never remove it. Others are pythons, slow-burning problems that eventually squeeze an organisation. Woods was a cobra. So is Mbappé’s meme, since no contract clause anticipates a joke about a joke.

Ye and adidas was a python. The rapper’s behaviour had worried people for years before his antisemitic remarks in October 2022 forced adidas to end the Yeezy partnership. The bill was steep. Adidas warned that holding back the unsold stock could cut revenue by around €1.2bn, and the split contributed to its first annual loss in more than three decades. Investors filed a class action alleging the company had known about the risks long before it acted, which adidas denied. Chief executive Bjørn Gulden’s eventual answer was pragmatic: sell the remaining shoes and give a large share of the proceeds to organisations fighting hate. The last pair went at the end of 2024, with €260m set aside for donations.

For organisations caught in a python, Hilary and Soulodre pointed to the International Olympic Committee’s handling of the Salt Lake City bribery scandal: apologise immediately, investigate and punish in the medium term, then reflect and reform.

How quickly should a brand respond when its ambassador causes a scandal?

The most practical research comes from Stefan Hock of the University of Connecticut and Sascha Raithel of Freie Universität Berlin. Writing in Management Science, they examined 128 episodes of negative endorser publicity between 1988 and 2016, affecting firms in 230 cases, and measured how share prices moved after each company responded.

Firms that responded within 72 hours saw their value rise by 2.1% over the following four trading weeks. Slower responders lost 1.9%, faring worse than companies that stayed silent altogether. Whether a firm stood by its star or suspended them mattered less than whether it said something, and said it quickly.

Their findings also offer a rough guide to the harder question of what to say. Investors rewarded firms that suspended endorsers who were clearly to blame, or whose misconduct related to their profession, such as doping. They rewarded firms that kept endorsers with a strong fit to the product. And they marked down firms that dropped endorsers who had apologised.

Run Mbappé through that test and the answer for a Western sponsor looks clear. He apologised within a day. The offence had nothing to do with football. For On, the fit could hardly be closer: he is helping develop its first football boots, due in 2027, and holds equity in the company, following the model On used with Roger Federer.

Why did Chinese brands drop Mbappé so quickly?

The Chinese brands reached the opposite conclusion within hours. Their customers, their regulators and their shareholders are in China, where a brand can earn credit by dropping a celebrity promptly. Speed still mattered; it simply pointed the other way.

Research from NEOMA Business School helps explain why the mood turned so fast. Nathalie Spielmann and Elizabeth Minton studied what happens when a foreign citizen fronts a product. A foreign face can lift attitudes towards a home-grown product, which is the logic of a French footballer selling Chinese milk and energy drinks. But the effect was strongest among consumers who weren’t thinking much about their national identity. A row framed as hurting national sentiment pushes that identity to the front, and the foreign face that helped sell the product starts to work against it.

The NBA paid in cash for a single tweet. After Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey backed Hong Kong’s protesters in 2019, Chinese partners walked away and CCTV dropped its games. Commissioner Adam Silver put the cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars, probably under $400m.

Sometimes a brand picks its audience deliberately. When Nike made Colin Kaepernick a face of its 30th anniversary “Just Do It” campaign in 2018, its shares fell about 3% amid burning trainers and boycott hashtags. Edison Trends reported online sales up 31% in the days that followed, and by the next week the stock had closed at a record high. Nike had decided which customers mattered most and accepted losing some of the others.

Memories can also be short. When photographs of Kate Moss apparently taking cocaine appeared in 2005, H&M first said it would stand by her, then reversed course under public pressure and dropped her, the costliest sequence by Hock and Raithel’s measure. Burberry and Chanel stepped back too. Police later dropped the case, Burberry was among the first brands to rehire her, and reports suggested her earnings more than doubled.

How brands can prepare for an ambassador crisis

What has changed since Woods is the pace and reach of a gaffe. A clip recorded for a French online show became a trending Weibo hashtag within hours, with no editor in between. A star’s words now land in markets with very different red lines, and an ambassador who is also a shareholder is harder to suspend than one on a simple fee.

How much weight one person carries is also a choice. Delphine Dion, who holds the LVMH Chair at ESSEC, and Eric Arnould have studied brands built around people. They separate brands where a single person embodies everything from those that spread the role across several people. The first gives a brand a clear, compelling face, and leaves it exposed when that face slips. On has built its football launch largely around Mbappé, though it has spread the load a little by making Thierry Henry its football director.

A brand can prepare the decision before it needs it: which audiences matter most, what would justify a suspension, and who signs off a statement inside 72 hours. 

On’s handling shows what that looks like in practice. Within a day it told Inc. that athletes’ statements represent their personal views, that it was “glad to acknowledge” Mbappé’s apology, and that it had “deep respect for the Chinese people”. It kept him, as Hock and Raithel’s findings would suggest for an apologetic star with a close fit to the product.

It had also cleared him from its Chinese social media. Dior, which counts him as an ambassador, and watchmaker Hublot did the same without a word, and in Adidas’s Beijing flagship store Real Madrid shirts were on sale with no Mbappé name on the back. The Western brands have chosen to stand by him in public while keeping him out of sight in China.

Mbappé lost the Ballon d’Or on Monday by a vote. He lost three sponsors on Tuesday over a meme.

Interested in this topic? You might also like…