Nike is supposed to be a brilliant marketing organization, even better at branding than it is at selling shoes and apparel. That’s why its fans had a ready response to those who wondered why Nike would want to alienate half the country by making Colin Kaepernick the face of its new Just Do It campaign. The ready response went something like this:

Before Kaepernick was revealed as the face of Nike’s campaign, only two percent of Americans reported hearing something negative about Nike. After the launch, that jumped to 33 percent. As the negative buzz set in, consumer sentiment followed, with favorability and purchasing consideration dropping.

Initially we heard Nike’s ace in the hole was that Nike customers were favorable to the Kaepernick campaign by a 2-to-1 margin. But when you think about it, that’s really not so good. Your own customers are already predisposed to buy your stuff. A marketing campaign that merely keeps them in the fold maintains the status quo, but you want a marketing campaign to do more than that for you.

Yet if one-third of your customers don’t like your new campaign, you’ve now risked destabilizing 33 percent of your existing market. How is that a branding win?



What’s more, before you decided to take sides on a hot-button cultural matter, no significant demographic group felt it had any reason to avoid you for cultural reasons. You just gave a whole bunch of them a reason to do so.

When Nike’s stock tanked 3 percent in the early days after the campaign, I wrote about it, but I also realized that stocks can recover pretty quickly when the initial buzz over something settles down and investors see that nothing so awful is going to happen. Stock prices convert to cash only if people buy and sell at a given moment. Otherwise they’re strictly theoretical.

But when the percent of people inclined to buy your products drops by 20 percent in a week, that is going to cost you real money.

I can’t wait to hear the Kaepernick defenders explain how Nike is actually winning big in all this, and everything from the stock drop to the falling public favorability just shows how we rubes simply don’t understand how brilliant Nike really is.