This Nike Thing: They Didn't Have A Choice

No politics, no emotions. Let’s strip away all the dust-up over the Nike-Colin Kaepernick ad and look at what really happened – and why it had to happen to try to reboot the Nike brand.

Nike isn’t on the verge of going out of business, far from it, but the brand is getting stale. As young people, the primary wearer of athletic shoes, get older and stop living in athletic shoes, brands have to reintroduce themselves to a new generation. It’s a cycle. Walk through a high school hallway right now and you’ll see brands like Adidas and Puma riding high like it’s the 70s again. Nike is the “old” brand.

Nike needed an Old Spice moment.

Old Spice was a dying brand until a few years ago when they delivered a shocking, bizarre ad campaign that made it cool for young men to wear Old Spice. The gamble was that those young men would continue to use Old Spice products for the next 20 years. It was a huge win.

I wasn’t in the Nike meeting, but I’ve been in plenty of similar ones. Nike did an Apollo 13. They looked at their problem and what tools they had on hand to fix it.

Here’s what they were looking at:

-       The brand is struggling with the younger demographic they desperately need to capture and keep for the next 20 years.

-       Research tells them this audience (younger Millennials aged 15-25) feels good about brands and people who take a stand on issues. Especially an anti-establishment stand. (Yes, Millennials are Boomers 2.0, but we’ll save that for another article.)

-       Colin Kaepernick, the face of an anti-establishment movement, was already on retainer.

The only question was when to launch. To use Colin Kaepernick, you would have to package it around the NFL season, but at what point? Launch at the beginning of training camp and you have the entire back to school shopping season ahead of you, but you run the risk of getting lost in the malaise of the NFL preseason. Launch at the beginning of the playoffs to take advantage of holiday shopping and you run the risk of dealing with Colin K’s declining relevance sinking to Tim Tebow levels.

The time was now.

Nike certainly knew the risks and rewards and I would assume the first few days went mostly according to plan. The stock took a multi-billion dollar hit (probably temporary) and the very inexpensive ad garnered tens of millions in media value. That doesn’t include the gazillions of impressions, positive and negative, generated by the social media explosion. (And I could be convinced that the negative social media impressions were the more valuable ones.)

Questions remain. The negative backlash was anticipated, but did Nike land the message with the audience they so desperately need? Will this translate to purchase intent? And will the moms and dads of those young purchase intenders be okay with forking over the credit card to seal the deal?

Some would like to call this whole thing a stunt. Okay, let’s say it is. IHOP’s recent name change stunt delivered a 4x increase in their hamburger sales and opened up a new daypart for their business.

Nike is a veteran of the brand reinvention wars. Moving from being the running shoe people to the amateur athlete people to the crosstraining people to the basketball people to the athleisure fashion people. Let’s see if they can pull another trick out of the marketing hat.