Background

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.

Describe the strategy

Our target audience is 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 SNKRS app has a high daily-usage frequency amongst our target audience but lacks a community discussion function, therefore we first launch our key content series on the SNKRS app before driving our fans to Weibo to further engage under our campaign hashtag. Our approach to restoring the lost pride and respect within the sneaker community was to leverage our brand influence and create a highly visible platform, in the form of a couch, 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

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

On the SNKRS App, the “SNKRS Talk” content series hit 2.8M views within the first 48 hours, and an average 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, translating to a media value of around 5.7M RMB with zero media spend. New sneaker stories are shared under our hashtag even till today.