Nike lost its cool
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Is Nike really uncool?
Is Nike uncool?
You know, I mean, certainly what's cool is a little bit in the eye of the beholder. And not being a particularly cool person myself, I don't want to assert what is and isn't cool for all people.
That said, Nike sales have been weak for the last few years and the company's stock is dipping. Their stock price is...
under $50, which is as low as it's been since 2015. What happened? Apple is not cool. Amazon is not cool. Nike is not cool. Starbucks is not cool. Big brands are not very cool right now.
Nike still sells a lot of shoes. Starbucks sells a lot of coffee.
What evidence supports claims about Nike's declining popularity?
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Who says Nike isn't cool? That would be Amanda Chicago Lewis, a journalist who recently wrote a big piece for The Economist titled Nike Just Can't Do It Anymore. What's she using as proof?
Nike still sells more shoes and more athletic shoes than any other company. However, the numbers are going down. And what investors usually like to look at is growth, which companies are getting bigger, which companies have the momentum. And so if you see a company becoming, you know, uncool and the sales are going down, that's not like a very good sign for the sustainability in the future. Yeah.
Okay, so Nike is not growing. Once upon a time, Nike was the biggest thing in the universe, or so it seemed. Tell me the story of how Nike went from the highest of highs to where it is now. What happened exactly?
What happened with Nike is when a brand goes from niche school to mass school, and Nike really did that with Michael Jordan in the 1980s. How does Mike fight gravity? Do you know, do you know, do you know, do you know? Is it the short socks? It went from being a brand that was seen as associated with joggers, with people who were sort of running for self-actualization reasons, to something that everyone was buying all across the United States and associated with one of the most popular athletes of all time. In order to make that pivot and stay relevant, the brand needed to attach it to self to American iconography, which generally has to do with independence, with rebellion, with freedom. For Nike, remember in the late 80s, there was a commercial that was set to the Beatles song Revolution.
You say you want a Red Bull. And then there was Just Do It, right? The idea of personal willpower being something that can allow you to overcome anything. The first commercial that involved Just Do It involved a guy who was 80 years old going on a run. So it's like, just because you're old, you can still do it, you know? I run 17 miles every morning. That, as sort of a political stance, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you know, individual responsibility, was something that was sort of cross-partisan, maybe, in the 1990s and the early 2000s. But in the last 10 years or so, has become pretty much passé, as I think people have talked more about the systemic forces that influence our lives. As Nike, you know, attempted to have what I describe in the piece as social justice-flavored marketing for such a long time that was sort of referencing seemingly progressive politics without necessarily, you know, being a company that followed through on those politics, depending on the situation.
The things got more complicated, right? And I think the major turning point came in 2018 when Nike did a campaign with the football player Colin Kaepernick, who had essentially been ostracized by the NFL for kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and racial injustice.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Is Nike really uncool?
0:01–0:43
2
What evidence supports claims about Nike's declining popularity?
0:43–13:05
3
How did Nike become a cultural icon in the 1980s?
13:05–13:36
4
What marketing strategies contributed to Nike's initial success?
13:36–25:02
5
What role did the Colin Kaepernick campaign play in Nike's brand image?
25:02–25:50