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Insights Michael Baker

Mad Men

Nike swooshed into America’s most hotly contested debate this week and simultaneously upended the way companies engage with social issues. The sportswear firm unveiled its campaign to celebrate 30 years of its ‘Just Do It’ slogan with the world’s most famous NFL star Colin Kaepernick out in front.

[vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” text_align=”left” background_animation=”none” css_animation=””][vc_column][vc_column_text]Nike swooshed into America’s most hotly contested debate this week and simultaneously upended the way companies engage with social issues. The sportswear firm unveiled its campaign to celebrate 30 years of its ‘Just Do It’ slogan with the world’s most famous NFL star Colin Kaepernick out in front. After his high-profile refusal to stand for the US national anthem in protest at the treatment of black people in 2016, Kaepernick was acclaimed by liberals, bashed by conservatives and left unemployed. Nike’s caption for their new ad: Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image image=”685″ img_size=”full” qode_css_animation=”” css=”.vc_custom_1538415978673{margin-top: 32px !important;margin-bottom: 32px !important;}”][vc_column_text]

The advert captured the global conversation. Nike’s big name supporters rallied around the brand on social media, some Americans torched their Nike gear in protest, the stock slid two per cent and PRs across the world hailed Nike a ‘purpose-driven’ brand.

Impact? The image is striking – sexy even – and alongside the copy, does not fail to connect. But the words in the ad are just the usual meaningless platitudes that would not be out of place on the wall of any corporate boardroom. It is not the cause this advert champions, but its narrator – Nike.

 

It’s true the advert represents a momentous shift in that brands are no longer blank canvases onto which companies ask us to project our own values. But as PRs and reputation managers, we salute this as an example of a ‘purpose-driven’ brand at our peril. By conflating purpose with advertising, we risk allowing our clients to conclude that being ‘purpose-driven’ is simply about appropriating a cause. In a world where consumers can now see through products to the factories and communities where they were made, reputation management and being a purposeful business is as much about what we do as it is about what we say.

Nike makes cheap clothes in poorer parts of the world, embroiders a trademarked swoosh and sells at eye-watering mark-ups. That isnot wrong, immoral or illegal, but this campaign does not change that. Let’s not be seduced into thinking that the hard work of building a business that is interested in more than its own bottom line can be achieved via just a clever ad campaign.

 

Stellar effort

 

In luminescent contrast this week, a British astrophysicist supercharged the effort to boost diversity and change the prospects for under-represented groups in physics. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who was herself overlooked for the Nobel Prize in 1974 while her senior male colleagues involved in her work on pulsars scooped the honour, has donated her $3m lifetime achievement prize to set up a scholarship scheme for people from under-represented groups. It was meaningful action designed to address the underrepresentation of women in particular and a tangible effort to create change.

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