Dive Summary:
- Tennis star Maria Sharapova had announced that she would temporarily change her name last name to "Sugarpova" to promote her candy brand, but those plans now appear to be scrapped—if they were ever on the table to begin with.
- Max Eisenbud, Sharapova’s agent, explained to ESPN that changing Sharapova's identification documents in order to facilitate international travel turned into too big of an obstacle.
- Venessa Wong at Bloomberg writes that the marketing stunt may have served at least two other purposes—distracting from her decision to dismiss her coach, Jimmy Connors, and driving up awareness for Sugarpova products, which were mentioned thousands of times on Twitter after her name-change announcement.
From the article:
... Still, the scheme has worked to some extent. The number of tweets that mention the word “Sugarpova” jumped from 50 yesterday to about 9,000 on Tuesday, according to the most recent data from social analytics company Topsy.com. ...