It’s never advisable to try and take on a giant at the height of its powers. The goal is to chip away at the giant via small attacks. Nike pulled off one of the biggest ad campaigns in history with the launch of Just Do It on the back of Colin Kaepernick’s protest. This launched Nike into a new strata with the next generation.
Every other brand sat on their hands and no one did anything.
This seems to be the logical play, ‘let the energy die down because delivering any marketing info at this point would be overshadowed.’ Or would it?
Naomi Osaka delivered defeat to one of Nike’s premier athletes. The greatest athlete of all time who had just been featured in one of the most moving commercials created for sport and brands, Serena Williams. The loss arrived on the back of controversy and instead of Naomi being celebrated the moment became a show of how gracious Serena was in asking the crowd not to boo. Naomi was diminished and by association adidas was diminished although both adidas and Naomi had won.
My immediate response was to search the web for marketing associated with Naomi. When the French Open ‘attacked’ Serena, Nike had an immediate response via Twitter that once again resonated with everyone. It was the right copy at the right time.
adidas had the opportunity to utilize Niche Out to take the narrative back to their rising star. Instead all I could find was a knock off picture of Naomi with ‘lazy’ copy. There hasn’t been a video on YouTube, no information delivered via their website, nothing that speaks to the struggle of overcoming one’s idol and the ramifications of creating a moment of greatness and dealing with the consequences when the world appears to be against you, there was nothing, just this tweet:
https://twitter.com/adidastennis/status/1038543408518836224
While the tweet had solid engagement, that was based more on the fact that people wanted to support adidas over Nike and less about Naomi. The comments about her spoke directly towards her being humble and overcoming an extremely difficult situation. Here adidas had the opportunity to take a biracial person and shine a light on both Japan and Haiti (building more international appeal), a young woman taking on her idol and winning (strength and grace) and the devastating ending which could have crumbled Osaka, but instead she shined and endeared herself to thousands. No one even knew she was an adidas athlete… and that’s a damn shame.
Note: adidas is taking a stand to promote women’s sports. You can follow that via the hashtag #CreatorsUnite
