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As the dust settles on the Tiger Woods drama, all eyes are turning to the disgraced golfer’s long list of lucrative product endorsements. Some have dropped Tiger while others are staying the course. None appear to be willing to ignore his notorious fall from grace.

It’s just the latest example of risks you take when you wrap your brand around a celebrity. When the going is good everyone wins. When something suddenly goes wrong, the brand and the celebrity quickly sink together.

Now comes the inevitable result of this all too obvious realization – a new line of insurance.

The DeWitt Stern Group, an insurance broker that specializes in coverage for advertising agencies and entertainment companies, is preparing to sell a new policy that would protect companies against the fallout from unexpected negative events involving their celebrity endorsers. A good idea, if you can afford it – but, unfortunately, it is just a first step.

As any company that takes a close look at the recall endorsement in its liability insurance policy will attest, standard issue recall insurance doesn’t really cover much at all. In order to be covered for the full cost of a significant recall, you need a special recall policy written specifically for the purpose – and those policies usually require that the insured have in place approved recall management and crisis communications plans as a condition of underwriting.

The same should, and probably will, be true for whatever celebrity endorsement policies come on the market in the wake of the Tiger Woods debacle. When it comes to potentially high-risk endeavors like manufacturing consumer products and hiring celebrity endorsers, you must not only be insured, you need to be prepared –and a solid crisis communications plan is the best place to start. But the plan cannot be separated from its implementation. It cannot sit on the shelf. It is itself an action item, to be continuously refreshed and rehearsed by the management team.

Companies that don’t want to anticipate the possibility of ever being part of a front-page scandal live in a make-believe world, or at least one without golf.

David Bartlett is a Senior Vice President at Levick Strategic Communications, the nation’s top crisis communications firm He is an experienced communications strategist and crisis manager, and a contributing author to Bulletproof Blog. Connect with Levick on Twitter: @Levick.