Social Listening - Matthew Beckett

The brand I have selected is Nike. Nike will always be a relevant conversation topic for years to come. One of the biggest areas that Nike is involved with is the basketball world. People all over social media have been talking about women's basketball's latest phenom Caitlin Clark on her new signing with Nike. She was offered an 8-year deal for 28 million dollars and for women's basketball that is a no-brainer. 

Nike interests me because I have always worn their apparel, and shoes, and wore their jerseys as a kid, and still do to this day. Nike isn't just an apparel brand anymore instead, they have a massive influence on culture, politics, and social issues in general. This adds another level of interest as to how they choose to run their marketing campaigns and what global issues they choose to address or not to address.

Nike's brand value proposition is to provide fashionable, innovative, and high-performance shoes and apparel for customers in every sport to meet their changing demands. Nike's slogan, “Just Do It,” is inspirational and motivating, fitting for its target audience of athletes.

Marketing for Nike on social media is quite simple. The biggest thing they try and do is market their signature athletes like LeBron James, Travis Kelce, Serena Williams, etc. When they do this they are trying to attract those athletes fan bases to influence them and the brand that they want to wear too. If little kids see their favorite athlete wearing Nike then they will want to buy Nike products too!

Anybody who has seen the way Nike markets knows how good they are at storytelling. Any Nike ad, commercial, or social media post you will see always has some kind of slogan and a famous athlete basically saying, "Work hard and you can achieve greatness", or something along those lines. Another thing Nike does really well which goes hand in hand with storytelling is engaging with their audience. Now it is very hard to engage with an audience as big and as diverse as Nikes is. However, they combat this by collaborating with different athletes from all over the world as well as artists to make sure they are reaching as wide of an audience as possible.

Our textbook author David Meerman Scott often talks about the importance of "real-time marketing" and I remember a time when Nike displayed this concept perfectly. If you remember the "Dream Crazy" campaign with Colin Kaepernick you'll know how I am going to tie this into real-time marketing. During that campaign, Nike decided to address the issues surrounding social justice and police brutality. Addressing these issues while they were current and active is what real-time marketing is all about. Making sure you are addressing current events and cultural trends in order to engage with the audience!

Nike is such a massive entity that it faces hardly any marketing challenges. However, if we had to find one I believe it would involve politics too much. When you involve politics and decide to make it known on who you support/which side you are on it can be detrimental to the audience. Previously mentioning the Colin Kaepernick campaign and how it was a good example of real-time marketing it also led to the burning of Nike apparel by people in the republican party because that campaign didn't totally align with their views. In result of that campaign Nike lost a lot of customers over the coming months after.

As a company, Nike is succeeding in their marketing efforts and will be a force in the sports industry for years to come. They do this by staying true to its brand values, embracing storytelling, leveraging social media effectively, and continuously innovating, Nike maintains its position as a powerhouse in the sportswear industry.

Since Nike has such a strong political basis people are always going to have mixed feelings about the company. Some good, and some bad so here are some of those current opinions...

GOOD:

- Another thing I saw was news that in 2025 the Nike Women's Marathon/Races are coming back. This is great for all the women consumers that Nike has in its demographic. This will give them the ability to wear and represent Nike at their own events!

- idamama181 says, "I'm excited for Nike to release more info on the 2025 events, but also trying to not set my expectations too high. I think it will be shorter distances (5k/10k) since they say it's a series. I just hope they aren't all virtual."

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GOOD:

- Nike is starting to re-issue Kobe Bryant basketball shoes! The highly sought-after "Kobe's" are finally being produced again and are available for purchase on Nike's websites but make sure to get them quick because they sell out quick.

- pacochalk says, They come out once in a while. Not hard to find the release schedule. Still hard to cop." 

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BAD:

- Nike is laying off around 1700 workers in order to cut costs. This is bad because it puts people out of jobs with little to no warning or compensation. Layoffs are never good for a business because that means they are compensating for a decrease in profit.

- a deleted account says, "i have a friend at converse - who is owned by nike - and it sounds like they’ll be announcing their layoffs in the next 3 months too"

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As we can see Nike themselves never responds to these kinds of social media comments and posts because they are such a massive company where they don't need to. It is essential for smaller companies and businesses to interact on levels like reddit posts and local blogs to interact and build a community. Nike already has a community, and a huge one at that, but what I am trying to say is that only negative outcomes are possible if Nike chooses to respond to little posts like these. If Nike chooses to entertain these negative, or good comments they would be wasting their time. Since Nike's audience is so big, press releases and mass social media posts are a much better way to answer people's questions rather than responding to a couple of individuals along the way.

 If I was a part of the brand managing team at Nike I would be surveying smaller social media posts like these ones to gather a generalization of what people are talking about when it comes to my brand. Then my next step would be to effectively and timely construct a social media post, press release, or announcement to address these issues in a way that keeps the consumers happy and doesn't negatively damage the brand's image.

Honestly, the main thing I learned from this assignment was how people love to make negative comments on social media like you wouldn't believe. I chose to search on the social media platform called Reddit and I am not super familiar with it but it definitely took me a little bit to find 2 positive things people were saying about Nike. Another thing I learned is that Nike isn't doing as well as in recent years. They have had to cut employees and have had a regression in total profit compared to past years. I am wondering if Nikes time is up as other sports apparel companies like Adidas, and New Balance are on the rise.