Campaign Analysis: Nike Football
As the world’s largest producer and one of the most popular brands of athletic apparel and equipment (See: Statista), Nike’s success could be attributed to its marketing and advertising campaigns. In 2013, it spent more than 1bil USD on advertising in the US. The company spends a massive amount of money each year on marketing and advertising in order to maintain its brand image and popularity among young adults and athletes and has been successful in doing so thus far.
Among its many categories, we have chosen to focus on Nike Football (or soccer).
A campaign that we would like to highlight is titled “No Maybes”, launched last year by ad agency Thousands Creative (See: Source). The campaign was in line with the Women’s World Cup and featured the US Women’s National Team. It showcases the “No Maybes” mentality by showing the team going through harsh and strenuous training even before they step foot on the pitch.
The social media platforms that the campaign utilised includes Youtube (See: Link), Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Ultimately, Nike wishes to promote its football gear and equipment to football athletes, thereby increasing its sales. By making use of the various popular social media platforms, it aims to increase its reach in the most effective manner; in particular, I believe Nike’s intended audience is young female athletes/football players who frequent social media sites, espcially those in America. A unique aspect about the campaign’s video is that it solely features female football players, hence this likely increases the campaign’s appeal towards young female athletes who are able to relate to the players featured.
An unintended group of audience could possibly be people who support the athletes (fans) but who do not partake in the sport itself. This would not reach its intended consequence of increasing sales as this group of people would not be consumers of Nike’s football-specific products.
Whether or not a campaign will become viral, which is what advertisers hope to achieve when releasing a campaign, depends on the social influence it is able to wield. As the campaign promotes a positive and desirable trait of not doubting oneself, the audience would want to identify with it and appear to have identified with it- this increases the possibility of people sharing the video with their social circle.
As with all campaigns, there could be the potential of inducing unintended effects. A possible unintended consequence could be promoting the interest towards the sport itself, or the sports team/players featured, rather than towards Nike’s products themselves. Hype may be generated with regards to the people seen in the advertisements, but this may not translate to an increase in sales of Nike producs, thus defeating the purpose of the marketing campaign.
Overall, this campaign did not generate enormous hype; we can see that the Youtube view counts for the campaign vid comes up to around 300,000 as of now, which is pretty mediocre in today’s standards. Nike has always been at the forefront in its marketing and advertising strategies. It understands its young target audience and heavily utilises social media platforms, which is the most fitting approach to reach out to its target group. However, it is always important for organisations to constantly reevaluate its marketing/campaign appraoches in order to achieve its end goals.
