Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation?

To counter the opportunistic social behavior of reselling limited edition sneakers for a quick profit, Nike's SNKRS App launched this through-the-line campaign that gave true sneaker fans a highly visible platform to collectively revive the true essence of sneaker culture and remind everyone that a sneaker's design and the story is what makes it desirable, not its street value in dollars and cents. Through this campaign, Nike SNKRS has leveraged its influence as the top sneaker e-commerce app to take a stand with true sneaker fans and reaffirm its position amongst the sneaker community as an advocate for sneaker culture.

Background

Absurd resale prices, professional scalpers, price manipulation hoarding, and raffle hacker bots have become the general impression of China’s sneaker scene, resulting in disillusioned sneaker fans and undermining sneaker culture at large; with even news agencies publicly condemning it as a “deformed cultural trend”. For SNKRS App’s 2nd anniversary, Nike decided to leverage its influence to To reclaim the spotlight from the opportunistic social behavior and shine it back onto the purest love for sneakers.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

As the whole of China anticipated the next hype sneaker on the SNKRS app, we dropped a bigger surprise: a couch that invited influencers and fans alike to take a seat on this sneaker sanctuary, online and offline, to share their personal stories behind the sneakers they are most passionate about.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

Our target audience are the true fans of the sneaker community who are passionate about everything sneakers. They see sneaker culture as part of their lifestyle and appreciate the design and stories behind each and every pair of sneakers. The current resale behaviour not only limits their chances of accessing the sneakers they love but also smothers their passion as sneakers usually end up in the hands of those who do not know how to appreciate them. Our approach to restore the lost pride and respect within the sneaker community was to leverage our brand influence and create a highly visible platform that speaks for the heart and soul of sneaker culture. By gathering fans to collectively express their true passion on our platform, we will become the loudest and most exciting voice in the sneaker scene.

Describe the execution (30% of vote)

Throughout three weeks, we partnered with six of the most well-known independent sneaker stores located in five cities in China and placed our couches inside them. We then invited local sneaker influencers onto the couches to create a "SNKRS Talk" content series that covered sneaker culture-related subjects under the themes of Legacy, Creativity, and Collaboration. Meanwhile, on our own social media, we dropped a virtual couch with an infinite number of seats for fans who couldn’t get to a physical one and invited everyone to jump on and participate in an organic dialogue around sneaker culture. Sneaker lovers could share their unique stories under our campaign hashtag either on the official SNKRS channel or through their local sneaker store social channels. By activating fans online and offline, our SNKRS Couch brought renewed excitement and chatter within the community all over China and allowed fans to express their deepest passions.

List the results (30% of vote)

On the SNKRS App, the “SNKRS Talk” series hit 2.8M views within the first 48 hours, and an average of 21% of active users viewed and engaged within our content threads. Over 2,600 sneaker lovers checked in at our 6 physical couch locations to share their one-of-a-kind sneaker stories. Across our partner sneaker stores’ social platforms, we earned an additional 3.7M impressions. Our campaign hashtag achieved 190M impressions across our social media channels, collected 124K user-generated posts on Weibo, and even entered the top 20 most searched keywords on Weibo at its peak. The comments section informed us that more people paid attention to sneaker culture related topics and shared their thoughts and feelings. Many fans also relayed how they are inspired by our campaign and wish SNKRS continue to run this platform for fans to voice their passions. New sneaker stories are shared under our hashtag even till today.

Please tell us about the social behaviour that inspired the work

Since 2019, China's second-hand sneaker resale market has exceeded 1billion US dollars in worth. With the exponential growth of the market came a large number of speculators and scalpers who see limited edition sneakers as an investment tool to make sizeable profits. This in turn created a number of "unfair" practices and methods such as hoarding to manipulate prices and the creation of hacker bots to out-raffle normal users. This phenomenon has since been so normalized even sneaker lovers turn in their favorite sneakers if the price is right. As a result, the sneaker scene has shifted from being a rich culture that is valued for the iconic design and stories behind each pair of sneakers to one that's mostly about their value on the resale market.