Get Woke, Go Broke?

Jason St. Clair the founder of Atheoz recently wrote a blog, about how Nike masterfully used “Wokeness” to drive sales up. Now I think this worked well for many reasons, with one of the main ones being the way they let it play out. They picked a shoe design that was something that only a small but vocal amount of people would find controversial. They then recalled the shoe based on the input of one controversial person sparking the very well planned controversy.  They did not appear to be setting out to make a statement, just release a shoe with an American Flag on independence day, something that would likely be seen as doing something simply patriotic, not controversial.

As for  Gillette, they set out to be openly controversial as they were losing market share. They launched the now-infamous “woke” commercial  “We Believe”. At first, it worked, as the controversy put them back into the public’s eye. However, the old idiom “There is no such thing as bad publicity,” proved to be false.

 On July 30th Gillette's parent company P&G  had to write down the company by 8 Billion, Billion with a B dollars. Gillette lost 5 Billion dollars since the ad dropped. Sure the ad garnered a lot of attention. But with 1.5million dislikes, the attention was mostly negative.

For further reading you can check out my blog post on the subject, by clicking here. Woke, Broke

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Until next time, I have been,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Entrepreneur,
Isaiah O’Connor