Don't do it?

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.