This reads less like a hit piece and more like a victory lap around NKE's virtue-signaling carcass. Many commenters on this forum have posted similar opinions and had them deleted by the mods.
But now it's global news:
https://www.foxnews.com/outkick-sports/colin-kaepernick-dylan-mulvaney-nikes-decade-left-wing-activism-finally-caught-up
Fox News? You mean, the same “news” organization that got sued for a ton of money for spewing the blatant lie of a “stolen election”?
Nike has problems for sure, but “wokeness” isn’t what did Nike in. That narrative is simply what Fox does: find a problem, then insert your own narrative into that problem. And hope people are d-mb enough to buy it. (Narrator voice: “They are”.)
If anyone wants a detailed breakdown of why Nike is suffering, I’ll gladly offer it. You’ll be very disappointed though if you think “wokeness” is central to that story.
@OP I love the Outkick sub-headline, "Colin K. Becomes The Face of Nike". There has never been a more disastrous campaign than "Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything." Thousands of NKE employees have lost their jobs over that astonishing act of willful self-immolation. Business schools and marketing departments will be studying - for decades - the sheer insanity of the folks who actually thought this would be a good idea.
"Still, it’s hard not to notice what Nike has been doing while its business has sputtered: picking fights over politics, race, patriotism, transgenderism and DEI."
Sad, but true, that their focus fell off of sports and went over to the political agendas instead. Of course, it's turned consumers off. Sell products - not opinions.
@dr I’m down to promote you. You probably have the best call outs on this forum.
The old guard thought they could just flip the switch and get us back to significant growth. But the market has changed, the circumstances has changed. The consumer is no longer millennials it’s Gen Z and Alpha, so you have to change how you operate and sell.
Causation vs Correlation. Nike wouldn’t be in this situation and getting heat on “woke issues” if they executed well and had great products. Nike wasn’t alone in taking a stand during the corporate social justice era and almost all of those companies are doing exceptionally well.
Nike’s biggest issue is senior citizen aged execs who have worked at Nike for multiple decades trying to sell sneakers to the youth. They are out of touch. Fire the old guard and let the younger generation lead the company. Finally, stop outsourcing your strategy to management consultants. They are not going to save you.
It would be fine if it was just that. It's everything else plus this kinda sh-t on top of it that divided the customer base basically in half.
for like 6 months, Fox News had a prime time headline that said X days since Nike failed to respond to obvious troll request from Fox News....It started out on the front page and slowly slid down until it dissapeared, but the level of butthurt failed trolling attempts by Fox and Fiends is just sad.
@ac Yeah this is an easy slam dunk. The right wing has lost the plot, anybody with principles that tells Trump to pound sand can get easy money.
But Nike doesn’t have principles.
Republican's buy sneakers too!
Believe it or not this might be the best news for Nike all yea. Being hated by Fox News is never bad for business.. assuming one has competent leaders.
Dead meat. A self-serving, activist-branded sweatshop monopoly that lost sight of its customers. The empire is still standing, but the story is over. Nike isn’t culturally relevant anymore - it's a tired brand living off yesterday’s reputation.