Social Media Monitoring Project. Part One

What is your favorite sports brand? Air Jordan? Adidas? Nike? Under Armour? What kinds of factors will make you love a sports brand?

Nike is a huge sports equipment company in US, and their products are very popular and famous, also, their strategies of brand monitoring and advertising are excellent, which all have a well illustration of Nike brand cultures&spirits (more than "Just do it")! We have to say those ads and brand monitoring strategies own most credits of the huge success of Nike. Let's check on some recent examples!

Nike "NOTHING BEATS A LONDONER" campaign

Nothing beats a Londoner
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Nike released an advertising video called "NOTHING BEATS A LONDONER" in early February this year, which made a huge success in social media, until now, this video already had 7 million views on Youtube (4.6 million views in a week). Londoners, especially those young generation, all gave positive reflection to this commercial, even some people who are not Londoner left good comments on it too. Many people were discussing on social media, they were curious about why this campaign could be so powerful?

The interaction between celebrity and people on Ins

In this campaign, you could see many sports, and Nike used real kids from London, and some celebrities and athletes who are both creditable and inspirational to young Londoners. Nike put Londoner, people, to be the focus of this campaign, by using the local culture and background to make people have sympathetic response, which is a great approach to attract people, because they can see themselves in this ads, they are the focus, they love the London spirit of this ads. In addition, Nike also used great groundswell strategy. Before the video has been released, Nike let those celebrities and athletes released their own standalone parts on Instagram and other social media platforms to attract the interest of people. And they interacted with people, then people reposted to their friends, which created huge groundswell influence.

But some people argued that this campaign might alienate others, other people who were from other cities criticized on it, because they felt they were ignored. That is the negative side of this campaign.

The influence of this campaign raised rapidly after it came out

Nike BHM series

Nike has been introducing brand new BHM theme shoes since 2003, because of the Black History Month, the main theme of shoes are all about to memorize that struggling history of black people. The main theme this year is equality, Nike recently released a video and couple brand new design special edition basketball shoes.

 The equality issue can attract public attention, it also can help Nike to build their brand ethics, which means they care about equality, they care about human rights, those behaviors can make people love your brand. And the designs of shoes are full of BHM culture factors, these shoes are well designed master pieces, which are attractive for their potential target, sneaker lovers. It is a great brand monitoring of Nike, they use a historic event as a chance to make related products, not only they can build their own culture through this campaign, but they also can let more people knowing them. They actually made it, when Black History month comes, people all will focus on what the new BHM Nike shoes look like this year. Nike just like to turn a historic event to their company event.

you can find a peak every year at BHM

Nike BHM
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Nike Want it All

In this campaign, Nike released an short film to illustrate their basketball brand culture and spirit, which was also powerful for those basketball lovers, or some basketball players who they just like the kid in that film, they desire to get in NBA. This campaign showed the positive energy of Nike, they encouraged people to pursue their dream, just like the word: "Just do it". This campaign attracted many people to post their pics to Nike with the hashtag "WantitAll" on facebook, and Nike also had some NBA players in this activity to attract more people. The interaction between Nike official account and people is a great communication by using groundswell.

The short film had 4 million views on facebook

But this campaign also caused some negative issues, like some people criticized this short film used a "black kid and basketball" stereotype, they believed this stereotype was overused, others even pointed out this stereotype could be a bias. In addition, some people said the kid in short film never did anything related with education, which might mislead young people.

Overall, Nike have made many success through their campaigns on social media, and we can find some groundswell thinking in their brand monitoring. Do you like Nike? Why or why not? How do you think about Nike's campaigns? Through these examples we can see some people did not like Nike campaigns, and they already gave their opinions, so how will Nike response to them, and how will Nike make some changes on their future campaigns are really interesting and important. From my perspective, Nike seem already have locked their target audience before they start the campaign plan, so other people who are not in the target range might not like the campaign. This target-locked approach is a good way to make sure the influence of campaign, but it is not good for the "others", Nike need to find out a way to make "others" get into their brand.

Nike want it all
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The trends of Want it all in past 3 months