Kevin Grewal mentioned in his blog post, The Decision, a new ad by Nike that was released in an attempt to ease their consumers negative views towards Lebron James’ decision to leave his home town.
It was a good preemptive strike for them to take in an attempt to settle the minds of countless customers and for them to be able to continue to use the marketing machine that is Lebron James. However, I’m sure they didn’t predict the backlash that their ad would receive.
Kevin pointed out that had they waited even a few more weeks, the fans would have been able to see what it was that made Lebron so great – his abilities on the court.
Instead they now face a backlash from the city of Cleveland that mocks the commercial they tried to put out.
Not only do they have to deal with that, but they also have to deal with the fact that it was made fun of on Southpark. SOUTHPARK! Southpark managed to make Nike’s use of rhetorical questions funny, at the same time as they were able to compare Lebron to BP’s C.E.O(which is not something anyone wants).
Should Nike’s marketing department have foreseen these likely scenarios? Probably. Did they? Not that we can see. I assume that they figured any form of retort would not have been able to achieve as much exposure as their advertisements on T.V. They seem to have miscounted YouTube….