Nike, Soccer & Aspiration

With the upcoming Superbowl this weekend and having recently read over Jonathan Cheng’s blog post from last night I thought this would be the ideal point to discuss aspirational marketing. For those of you unsure as to what aspirational marketing is, put simply it is the usage of celebrities in an advertising campaign to convince the consumer that their favourite people use their products. In Jonathan’s blog he talks about how Adidas has hired its athletes to play in an action type game to demonstrate that their product is durable and can perform in tough conditions. This would be aspirational marketing! I would like to introduce to you a commercial by a direct competitor, Nike. You may or may not have seen the following great video introduced by Nike just before the soccer World Cup in South Africa in 2010.

I know that it is a rather long video but this commercial touches upon the aspirational side of soccer. It depicts several players from the world’s best teams playing in a game of ‘do or die’ type soccer whilst using Nike’s new high performance cleats. The use of celebrities makes the consumer want to go and buy the product, at least I know I wanted to after watching it. You can also see national culture in this commercial, when they run through the various players, they show how the fans of that country are reacting whilst watching on TV (particularly when they focus upon Rooney and the stereotypical British press response). This use and understanding of national culture is key when targeting a group to sell to.

On a side note, by depicting different national soccer heroes it makes this commercial highly applicable throughout the world and although this may have been a costly commercial to produce, Nike can have no fear that this commercial will be successful worldwide.