Nike's Betsy Ross Air Force One Marketing Campaign

In the age of “wokeness”, the best of the best marketers have to get more and more creative to get their brand to stand out among the rest. Say what you will about Nike’s marketing style lately, one thing for sure is Nike knows how to get their name to stand out among a very crowded field of sports apparel companies. 

            Regardless of where you stand politically on Nike’s recent marketing campaign, it’s been an undeniable success. Just do a quick google search on, “Betsy Ross” and you can see how much engagement they have created through all social media and traditional media outlets. 

            Now that you know that Nike planned this all from the beginning, I’ll just do a very quick and broad breakdown of how they did it.

1.    Create a shoe design that has some powerful emotional attachments to it. Through much discussion they decided on the Betsy Ross Flag. Side note, being a Californian, this flag really doesn’t have that much emotional response for me, however, I can tell you for sure, that Northerners and Southerners, many of them, still care deeply for what that flag represents.

2.    Now that they have flag design down, when should the shoe be launched to create maximum effectiveness. July 4th, America’s birthday. 

3.    Get a very small number of shoes created and get them sent out to a few stores, to show that, yes indeed, this was a real shoe! See, we made them and shipped them

4.    Get their very controversial spokes-person to make, can you believe this, a controversial statement. 

5.    Now recall the shoes

6.    Somehow “accidentally leaked that information to major media outlets” why those shoes are being recalled.

And you know the rest of the Story, huge media coverage, Outrage, support ect. etc. etc.

As a marketer and business person, I’m truly amazed by how they pulled this off. I wonder what Nikes next stunt they have in store is!

Thanks for reading

Jason 

P.S.  Are you surprised that this was all planned? I bet many of you didn’t actually even think twice about Nike carefully orchestrating the whole thing. That’s the genius of it. Remember at the end of the day, the only thing Nike is really going to care about it money and how much of it they can make.