Welcome to Business Ethics, the part of the blog that will discuss business. Kinda. It won’t be as serious as it sounds. It’ll basically just take on different topics in business, of past and present, in an honest and unique way. Just be thankful I didn’t call this section Funny Business.
The big news of the past few days has been Nike’s new ad featuring Colin Kaepernick. The unveiling of this ad was polarizing and has to led to some extreme reactions; mainly the burning of Nike apparel by those who disagree with the choice.
Now this is objectively funny. Destroying your own property, essentially throwing money in the trash, because a big corporation hurt your feelings is just quality humor. But outside of the lunacy of ruining your own material possessions, this is just a flat out bad strategy. The whole motive behind this move is to proclaim distaste for the brand and hurt the business’ bottom line but in reality they are accomplishing the exact opposite.
Let’s talk about this from a pure advertising standpoint. Gaining and maintaining brand awareness is super hard. Obviously Nike, as one of the most recognizable brands in the world, already has huge brand awareness but even they need to continue to innovate in order to stay relevant and ward off competition. When it comes to advertising objectives, its good to get someone to see your ad, even better to get someone to click on your ad, and great if they land on the brand page the ad was driving consumers to. But it is damn near impossible to get someone to share a piece of your brand’s content with their peers on their own volition. There are rare examples but those are no doubt the minority. Dilly Dilly!
Thus, if getting your core brand loyalists to share your brand is difficult, getting people who hate your brand to share it has to be considered a miracle. It’s an absolute heroic display of advertising prowess that comes at no cost to the brand.
But what about the customers that the brand lost due to their polarizing decision?
These were not good customers with a proclivity for repeat purchases. I can promise you that. I don’t have hard facts on that (this is a post-facts blog) but I can tell you from everything I know that true sneaker heads don’t burn their prized possessions on an emotional whim. The dudes who wait for every new pair of Nike’s to drop are not about to turn around and light those same shoes on fire. No, only a fake fan would do this. It’s kind of like how Kanye has said some pretty crazy stuff recently but you aren’t hitting skip if “Stronger” comes on the shuffle.
These idiots could live without their wack pair of Nike’s so they decided to make a “bold” statement because it was easy. You want to really test them. The CEO of a water filtration product should come out with a polarizing statement and see how they do without clean water.
Wait, they already smashed their Keurigs. Stupidity is undefeated.
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