Voting with your wallet!

Risky to stand up or risky to blend in?

Blending in, following trends, adjusting the marketing plan from last year, all these things are risky if you want to improve a business because they are a guarantee of waste of companies money. You can not expect to do the same thing as last year, only change the gift wrapping (creative work) and expect a different result.

A majority of ads today have no hope of being noticed. Nike not only got noticed, people that love Nike came to its defense. Provoking this type of reaction while staying on brand is hard to accomplish. 

Today, standing on the sidelines is the same as to stand on the irrelevant side. The younger generation demands trust and transparency from brands they support. They want to know what those brands support so they can decide to support them or not. They have a high notion that a vote with their wallet is more powerful than their vote at the ballot box.

The world is commenting on an advertising campaign, while it remained mostly silent to daily school shootings in that same country. This shows how powerful brands can be. 

Nike’s CMO in 1987, Scott Bedbury defined Nike’s social benefit as getting people to stop watching sitcoms and get them up and running. While it was strange to see someone running on the street in 1987, today it is normal. Nike lost its social benefit because it is commonplace now.

Nike for the last 3 years has been losing sales to Adidas, after Adidas hired away many of Nike’s top designers. In the other hand, Nike is changing their social benefit which will reduce price sensitivity. People will be willing to pay more to show society that they support diversity. This will allow them to increase profit margins and social impact.

This ad uses 3 of 25 behavioural biases that will increase profit. People have become polarised. There is no grey area anymore. People have black or white opinions. If Nike stands for diversity, where does that leave the main competitor which was started by a Nazi? 

In a world where courage is in short supply, I applaud NIKE, but this was the safest thing they could do to really start to turn things around.  Watch the stock and you will see what I mean.