Stay in your lane / While other brands took flak for making ads to encourage social distancing during the coronavirus lockdown, Nike’s ‘play inside, play for the world’ message was largely well received.
One reason for this discrepancy was that other attempts, such as McDonald’s separated Golden Arches, were over-styled, shifting the focus to the brand’s own creativity and sparking suspicions of awards-grubbing.
Nike focused on the message and kept it relevant to the brand by telling people to play sport at home, rather than making a plea for social distancing more generally.
Borrowed interest / The Living Room Cup leverages Nike’s connections with top-flight athletes to offer people an enticing challenge: they may not be able to compete with Ronaldo at football, but there’s a chance they could one-up the global sports personality in a sit-up competition. It also allows the brand to reach the athletes’ large social media following (Ronaldo has 213 million followers on Instagram, for instance).
Pandemic Fitness / In the first two weeks of lockdown in the UK, 60% of people in the country said that they exercised less than usual, according to an Institute for Employment Studies survey.
But while exercise might be taking a hit overall during lockdown (if these survey results can be extrapolated across different countries), it is also true that the number of people looking for ways to stay active at home has soared.
Searches for home-exercise videos on YouTube increased 200% in the UK in March, compared with the averages for January and February. And ‘Body Coach’ Joe Wicks broke a Guinness World Record late last month when 955,158 people tuned into his live workout session on YouTube.
Nike itself got an early glimpse of this trend during China’s coronavirus shutdown, when user activity on its personal training apps increased 80%.
Nike’s home exercise campaigns not only meet a demand, they frame the brand as a helpful one, offering practical solutions that reinforce its core message that everyone is an athlete.
Just as importantly, these measures also keep Nike relevant and top-of-mind at a time when traditional sport has been put on hold, robbing the brand of its prime marketing medium. Nike, for instance, was a sponsor of the postponed Tokyo Olympics, a fact that it nods to in the You Can’t Stop Us spot with the line ‘We may not be playing for our countries yet.’
By encouraging home workouts, Nike is doing more than just engaging with its fans, the secondary benefit is that giving them a reason to buy sports gear even if they can’t get to the gym or to a sports store. It’s notable that when the virus first hit in China and Nike had to close stores, the brand saw online sales in the country rise by 30%. Initiatives like the Living Room Cup, where amateur athletes are encouraged to share their workouts on social media, motivate people to work out in clothes that they will want to be seen in, at least on social media, if not in front of people out in the world.
Recession-proof / Numerous studies have shown brands that continue to advertise through a recession recover better than those that don’t. In this article, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute cites a 2003 longitudinal analysis that showed firms that ‘increased advertising spend during a recession did slightly better than firms who increased advertising spend during other times.’
The advantage appears to lie in brands maintaining (or increasing) share of voice when competitors choose or are forced to withdraw from advertising.
Nike’s efforts here are directed towards earned media, not advertising, but they are potentially effective for the same reasons. As so many other sports brands sit on the bench waiting for normal play to resume, Nike has the field almost to itself.
