Originally Posted by Strongside
(Post 14333530)
Some of you genuinely don't understand how marketing and advertising work in today's world, and I get that. But to say that Nike has nothing to garner from this financially is ignorant.
Let me give you a rundown.
We live in a world where the masses are so inundated by advertising at every turn that it's become noise. And people are better than ever at tuning it out. We're watching cable television (the harbinger and mainstay for media purchasers for decades, the easiest way to reach your audience) in record-low numbers. Online tools like ad blockers allow people to literally never see an ad.
Big brands like NIKE spend literal billions of dollars paying agencies like Wieden+Kennedy to figure out how to remain relevant. To figure out how to disrupt.
Ever heard of positioning? In ad school, positioning teaches that the average consumer only has room for 3 brands in their mind for any given category. Three. That's it.
Think of the first three shoe companies that pop into your head. For me, it's Nike, Adidas and Vans. That means that brands like Reebok and K-Swiss have some work to do with me, personally. But those billions we talked about are being used to study the positioning of a broad swath of people on a macro level. If brands like NIKE find that they're slipping when it comes to positioning, it's time to disrupt the market.
And in today's world, disrupting the market doesn't always mean coming out with an innovative new product. Disrupting the market means getting people to TALK about your brand. Good or bad. Having your brand name become the #1 trending topic on Twitter is so coveted that marketing directors all over the world are being hired, promoted, or fired based on their ability to do just that.
And they can't just pop out a kitschy new ad campaign either. That alone doesn't work anymore. This is our reality now. Sensationalism for the sake of relevancy.
Nike may not have done this as part of a media stunt, but I can promise you they aren't hating what's going on right now. If this were a decade-old shoe brand they'd be in trouble. But this is, quite literally, the biggest sports brand in the world – suddenly top of mind for everyone paying any sort of attention. So when those positioning surveys come out, they'll still sit firmly at the top.
I sit in these meetings on a weekly basis. And while I've never been in a meeting where someone suggested, "Let's make it look like our brand cares more about the opinion of a spokesperson who sucks at football than they do about their own country in order to generate interest and brand recall...," I've certainly heard and executed some crazy shit for the sake of making the wheels of the machine turn.
And for the "They are getting nothing good from this" crowd. You might want to check the stock market today. Because you're ****ing wrong.
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Kaepernick has Nike pull American flag shoe.
(https://www.chiefsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=323681)