Nike has received a lot of backlash following using
Colin Kaepernick for their Just Do It campaign. Kaepernick is an athlete and activist
against police brutality. He took the knee during a football match which resulted
into widespread (online) criticism, which even featured a furious tweet from
the American president. After using Kaepernick, Nike received besides a huge
following, also a huge backlash, including a boycott (Vox.com).
On social media, a lot of people started uploading videos or images of burning
Nike products under the hashtag #BurnYourNikes. The hashtag, however, seemed to have
been used mostly in tweets mocking the brand’s opponents. Nike has since stood
by their campaign and seemed to even have gained a better reputation and market
position. It is clear that Nike has used the mixed commotion resulting from
taking a political stance to their advantage. It can be, however, considered
risky of a consumer brand that initially is not politically affiliated or
natured to take a strong political position in a heated topic such as racism. Perhaps
surprisingly, the engagement of such brands in political activism through their
marketing and PR campaigns seems to become more and more a trend. It worked out
for Nike, but was this a case of pure luck? Is it worth the potential
anti-brand activism amongst consumers that such a campaign can trigger?
Figure 1 Source: https://brokenglasspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Burning-nikes-2-1024x675.jpg
Burnt?
The reason why Nike’s campaign worked could be
attributed to Nike’s good estimation of how much empathy in comparison to how
much hate they would receive. The moral or political issue at hand (police
brutality) may have brought a very divided discussion amongst the American
population, but racism is lately generally in media treated as a structural problem
in American society. Police brutality is an act of violence and a large group
of people, especially younger generations, in the US regard it as a huge
problem. Research (Romani et al., 2015; Dauvergne, 2017) has found that a lot
of anti-brand activism actually results from empathic people disliking immoral
practices of brands (i.e. using palm oil or using sweatshops). If the political
issue at hand opposes immoral behavior (i.e. police brutality in Nike’s case) anti
brand-activism is logically likely to be lower. Another research has shown that
a lot of damage control following a brand crisis can be done by the general
public themselves on social media (Sung & Hwang, 2014). This was also the
case with Nike: lots of (young) people, clouded the hashtag to mock those who
used it seriously. This shows that Nike’s ‘risky’ political campaign was perhaps
not as risky after all. As the majority of those active on social media were in
favor of their stance, they hardly had to step in with PR strategies to ‘save’
their reputation from the initial backlash. Being smart about what message you
endorse and stance you take might help you as a company to not only use
politics as a helpful tool to constitute what your brand stands for, but also
to help you control potential damage you might suffer without a lot of
resources or PR effort. Nike might have taken a knee, but clearly did not lose
their face.
Tamara Raats
is a Communication Science Research Master student at the University of
Amsterdam, who is mainly interested in persuasive, digital and entertainment
communication.
