Winning isn't for Everyone

Nike Loses Ground

What’s missing in this picture?

Once or twice a week, I wheeze asthmatically around the Rose Bowl’s three mile track, getting passed by guys twenty years my senior and girls twenty years my junior. Endorphins are nice, but I mostly dread the experience. At Run With Us Pasadena, on the other hand, I’m a kid in a candy store. 

A high-powered branding professional such as myself loves nothing more than exploring this little high end suburban boutique full of primordial running shoe brands—a bevy of new names, logos, shapes, and taglines ready for me to cast judgment upon without having to actually run anywhere. It palpably bursts with exotic, overpriced yuppy freshness. Running shoes, like Erewhon, are a new kind of status symbol that looks upon the naive dreams of the 90s not with nostalgic love, but with disaffected disgust. “Yeah…no thanks.” Sunshine, white teeth, and good retirement planning. No bullsh*t Gen Z street signaling; no GOATs in sight.

Hoka (French/American), On (Swiss), Hylo (UK), Diadora (Italian), 361 (Chinese), Mizuno (Japanese), Altra (American), Topo (American), Rabbit (American…my favorite overall brand of the bunch), not to mention the normal standbys Brooks (American…originally founded by Quakers), New Balance (American), ASICS (Japanese), Saucony (American). 

On a special rack sits a set of so-called “speed shoes” or “supershoes” with carbon plates inside, like little trampolines, all in the $250 range. These are a new innovation that—it’s not just marketing—really do make you faster; enough faster to have caused great controversy at the Olympics. They’re ultra light and foamy, but impossible to bend, which creates a sort of tactile uncanny valley when you handle them. 

In any case, such a delicious array of human ingenuity and creativity really gets the heart pumping. But something is missing. Something big.

Nike. 

Where are the Nikes? 

Nike began with running. Nike’s soul has always been running. Oregon Ducks, Prefontaine, Phil Knight’s six nightly miles, all of that. Nike is the original, and for very long time the only, American running shoe. It finally vanquished the Germans (adidas) and the Japanese (Onitsuka) to conquer the world.

It put Portland on the map. Without Phil Knight’s little running shoe startup there would be no Portland. It would just be another misty gray sub-Seattle riverland, probably still inhabited by Native Americans. Sure, in recent decades Nike is more known for basketball, but only five years ago it was still innovating enough to make the very first controversial carbon-plated supershoe, the Vaporfly. 

There’s a saying, “never forget where you came from” and ol’ Phil really doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to shun that rule. So what happened? Where the hell are the Nikes? 

I asked the store clerk. They did once have Nikes, but they stopped carrying them. For one, Nike simply stopped showing up—it was more interested in sneaker geek/streetwear stores in Fairfax and Downtown than suburban shops. More importantly, she told me that Nike requires stores to carry massive inventory, meaning much less room for new and less famous brands. At the moment, the high end consumer was looking for more variety, so better to have no Nike than all Nike. Unlike sneakerheads, people who spend $200 on running shoes are an entirely different breed, and they’re tired of the same old slop.

I chose the UK-based Hylos, truly gorgeous, with Gigeresque foam bottoms supporting a sort of woven eggshell white canvas shell, a cool black horizontal lightning bolt logo I’ve never seen, and industrial-drawing details around the tongue. They recall the seams-showing, inside-on-the-outside style of Virgil Abloh.

My previous pair, from the same store, was an ultra-limited edition Brooks shoe called the Aurora BL DNA Loft V3 that looked even more bizarre, the same sort of moonboot foam but a translucent thin plastic upper with bright orange details, supposedly injected with nitrogen. (This whole haunting, bubbly, cursed-moonboot silhouette now so popular in running shoes derives from Yeezies, which are in turn derived from Alexander McQueen’s famous Armadillo Boots and other crazy-puffy heels made famous by Lady Gaga in her Bad Romance music video…but that’s a story for another time). I’ve searched for replacement pairs of the Aurora BL’s, but they have literally vanished from the earth. Exactly how I like it.

Innovation in most sectors of footwear has slowed to a crawl. This is particularly true of basketball, soccer, and tennis, where incumbent brands are still trading on brand equity from the 1990s. They bully retailers into holding such a vast quantity of their products that no new ideas can sneak in—a similar pattern to anti-competitive corporate globalism now apparent in all sectors throughout the world.

The sole (herr derr) exception is in the running sector, where new technologies and upstart shoe brands are penetrating the market like never before. Specialty running stores like Run With Us have become smorgasbords of experimental new brands, and they’re the most exciting retailers around. Much like Erewhon, the past five years have seen their lily-white suburban aesthetics shift from ignorable to irresistible.

But, again, where is Nike? 

Apparently, getting lapped. It’s spending its long over-valued brand capital releasing Soylennial slop-mercials “Winning Isn’t For Everyone” that some Hype Dad and his army of manager-harridans have convinced themselves is like totally epic bro. Like totally Brat, fr fr. The campaign reaches backwards in time to the heyday of inspirational Nike ads, the greatest of all time perhaps “Failure” for Jordan, but these new ones reverberate as tinny and cringe. 

There’s an uncomfortable coding to the tribal “winner supremacy” battle cry at the core of these ads. They’re not about overcoming adversity, like the Jordan ads, they’re about adversity not mattering. What matters is your unchangeable status as a winner among losers. “Am I a bad person?” Willem DeFoe asks, in the below ad, continuing “I think I’m better than everyone else. I want to take what’s yours and never give it back. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.”

This is supposed to be a radically honest insight—something Nike agency Wieden Kennedy is famous for—but it comes off as awkward because it’s interspersed with woke, all-athletes-are-equal imagery. Of course, this is the point: it’s making a tribe out of woke strivers. The thing uniting your tribe isn’t effort— “Just Do It” despite the weather—it’s winning itself. Join us, and you will have already won, and will happily tune out those who haven’t. You couldn’t imagine a better metaphor for the blindness of the urban elite, Nietzsche’s “Last Men” whose will has been warped into a hideous contortion: the merciless competition to appear merciful. “Winning Isn’t for Everyone” would seem highly fascist, but it’s okay because they’re all diverse ‘n sh*t. 

Moreover, the ads appear to be pre-built to gloat about the importance of “victory,” a la Kamala’s victory, in the face of us loser chuds who just can’t help but lose despite all the enviable confidence of the average white guy.

But lose we did not. Nike, meanwhile, is having its worst year in 25 years. It’s hemorrhaging stock price, revenue, and market share, a sort of slow motion Bud Light, a bleeding “boycott” for having tripled down on woke, and lost. Much like Bud Light, however, it’s not actually a boycott, it’s simply bad business. 

It knows something is very wrong. It’s scrambling to hire or re-hire old white guys. Investors are getting restless. In 2017, some hot shot convinced Nike to severe ties with many retailers in order to chase that good good Allbirds direct-to-consumer money—a decision eerily similar to Hollywood Studios destroying their brands to become unprofitable second-tier streaming platforms—a decision that it’s now scrambling to reverse.

But is Nike really a slow-mo case of go woke go broke? An article in WSJ titled “How Nike Missed the Boom in Running Culture” would suggest yes. Not because, like Bud Light, they made some grievous mistake, but more like the Kamala campaign: wokeness has made them incompetent. They can’t pivot when necessary, because they can’t see the track. They aren’t agile or open enough to shift with the trends. And we’re seeing that, glaringly so, in the running sector. 

So what exactly is Nike doing, or not doing, wrong?

Behold, the almighty marketing funnel. This is the original, the old school funnel.

You’ll see that it ends at the act of purchase, which I personally have been trained to call “conversion” (there are several interchangeable terms for each step). The funnels of today, however, have added an important final step. This new final step has become so important that it has pretty much subsumed all marketing. If today’s propagandists are honest, all they really want is this last final step.

It also has many synonyms, but I call it “advocacy.” 

Advocacy means all the ways that modern humans entangle themselves with brands on a personal level—a level of idol-worship that prior propagandists, even Bernays, truly couldn’t have imagined. The most obvious of these is of course social media.

Not only do you buy the shoes, you post pictures of them, maybe even a little unboxing review, maybe a little thirst trap. Then you follow the brand. Its sassy tweets sound like the drag queen brunch that you’ve been trained to love but have never actually been to: so you throw them up on your Story.

Advocacy is all about the real holy grail of modern day marketing: not sales, not attribution, but virality. 

One advocacy arena is called experiential marketing. I worked at an experiential agency for two years. At Comic Con, we put on Walking Dead activations with live zombie actors, and an IMDB x Carl’s Jr VIP yacht party at which my co-workers were forced to dress up as giant pieces of bacon. We titillated Basketball Americans with our sleek Hennessey parties at Complex Con, and built giant cardboard statuary gardens, like the nests of monstrous female bug-aliens, ever-pink Santas workshops with tinsel and fluff and angel wings to entrap obese women in malls throughout the country. You would be shocked at how many Americans are eager and excited to wait in line for hours to (God help us) to interact in some arbitrary forgettable way with the brands that have become their idols, in the most biblical of senses, and, of course, to post pictures of them doing so.

There’s a yet deeper nesting doll of experiential marketing that’s viewed as the best, and stickiest, most advocacy-y, type of all. And that’s called community marketing. 

Community marketing is muddy, and at times corrupt (it can implicate public/private crossovers e.g. public school brand collabs, giving brands access to longterm taxpayer-funded contracts). But one crystal clear, non-morally contemptuous example of community marketing is run clubs.

Run clubs have popped up all over the country as a fixture for a laptop class hungry for human interaction. They’re surrogate communities known as great places to meet members of the opposite sex. Run With Us hosts several different run clubs in the Pasadena area. I participated in one and tweeted immediately afterwards “incels, if you want to meet women, just join a run club.”

Run clubs are also great places to meet brands. Like pharma reps courting the choicest hospitals, shoe reps court the choicest run clubs. This is community marketing at its finest—the new friends, the beautiful shoes, the potential sex…it’s all mashed into one thing.

Nike toed the waters, but then seemed to lose interest in run clubs, focusing instead on stunning and brave campaigns involving fat people, black people, and people with no legs, none of whom are into jogging.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Nike’s massive failure in “How Nike Missed the Boom in Running Culture.”

“New Balance has field reps around the world who engage local running coaches and run club leaders, said the company’s vice president of running, Kevin Fitzpatrick. The goal is to make a connection with runners that they will remember next time they are looking for a new pair of shoes, Fitzpatrick said. “You don’t see the immediate return, but you do see it over time…”

Brendan Eng’s running group in Portland, Ore., has roughly quadrupled in size since 2021 to about 80 runners. And that doesn’t include the representatives from New Balance, Hoka or Asics who regularly show up at its events to let runners try new sneakers, give out free merchandise and pay for drinks after the workout…

One local giant has been conspicuously absent from the road-running scene: Nike.  

“In the three years I’ve led this group there have been only two Nike road demos. I feel like I’ve seen the Hoka rep four times this year,” Eng said.

[Nike] Executives acknowledge they lost ground in the critical running category and say they are doubling efforts to regain a stronger grasp of the market.

“We underinvested in that, and that’s what we’re reinvesting in,” Nike Chief Executive John Donahoe said of the running category in an April interview.

“Hoka was the first brand to show up about two years ago. and other footwear companies like Mizuno and Brooks soon followed. The first time she heard back from Nike was in late April, when a rep brought pairs of the Invincible 3 for runners to try on.”

But wait! Nike did, however, seem to show interest in one particular run club.

“Some run clubs say Nike has a strong presence. Amir Armstrong co-founded a run club out of the sneaker-themed Deadstock Coffee in Portland’s Old Town neighborhood. There are two running groups and a walking crew that meet every Tuesday, and during the summer the runs can draw over 100 people. When a brand comes, which happens almost every two months, it can be twice as many and it is like a block party, he said.”

So what’s different about Deadstock? Here’s the kicker. Deadstock is a black-owned streetwear store slash coffee shop. It’s nationally famous. I’ve been there, and interviewed the owner in a prior life. It’s woke and Civil Rights-y, with pictures of basketball players on the walls, and a tagline stenciled next to the door “Coffee Should be Dope.” It’s about as far from Run With Us Pasadena as you can get. And I’d bet the last thing its patrons are interested in are high performance running shoes from Switzerland, or soles injected with Nitrogen.

Shoe Dog is one of my favorite books about business. Phil Knight is a surprising character—an anxious, self-deprecating accountant. His core motivator is always pragmatism—all grit, problem-solving, sense-of-urgency. He runs long distance, six miles per night, to ease his nerves. He never even wanted his own brand, he was forced into it after his relationship with Onitsuka, of which he was an importer, went sour.

“We have a product, we need to release it, let’s get the brand solved so we can get it out the door,” was his perspective. He conquered Germany and Japan not out of design thinking, as Steve Jobs might have, but with spreadsheets and supply chains. He admits that he was crazy neither about swoosh, designed by an art school friend aquaintance $35, nor the name Nike, which came to his swaggering lead salesman Jeff Johnson in a dream the night before the brand launched globally. Before that, Knight wanted to call it Dimension Six. 

So it begs the question how Nike, still innovating in its original sector less than a decade ago, could so brazenly missed the boat on where the running industry was headed; namely, away from urbanity and towards the suburbs.

Sports culture at large is moving in the same direction, away from hip hop and towards Trumpism: Trump stuff is dominating endzones and dugouts, despite PR teams attempts to ban it and “end the availability” of the stars that do it. Even our cleverist sports writers like Jason Gay can’t bring themselves to write about it. Instead, they’re assigned lukewarm hit pieces on Dana White, finding various sniveling ways to call him a hypocrite.

Like Nike, the media is firmly committed to its horse blinders. Unlike Nike, the media sells subscriptions to ideologues and ads to corporations, not shoes to people. In the former instance, market pragmatism isn’t important—which is why CNN can shill trans 24/7, but Bud Light can’t. When you have to sell products to Americans, you’ll need to eventually be honest about Americans. Otherwise, it’s not that you’ll get boycotted—Nike has openly embraced boycotts as a sort of dark community marketing, pandering to the mainstream media in ways sure to go viral. No, you risk something far worse: getting ignored. Which is exactly what’s happened to Nike at Run With Us Pasadena.

Nike has so far chosen the side of monopoly over competition and globalism over America. It could easily shift its marketing strategy to anything it wants. Perhaps an wholesome and insightful Nike x America 250 Anniversary collab. It could partner with Erewhon on a smoothie geared specifically towards run recovery. Forget culture entirely and go all in run tech. In pretty much any instance, abandoning woke and returning to vanquish these upstart run brands would be the most practical, most Phil Knight-esque thing to do. Nike, after all, is the goddess of victory. Victory is what the brand, and its founder, have always stood for.

But sadly, it would appear that winning isn’t for everyone.