👟 Even Nike Can Lose Cultural Relevance

Consumers today are unforgiving. Brand loyalty is declining and competition across categories is increasing. This makes marketing more difficult and complicated than ever before.

Take the Nike Dunks — at one point, they were the hottest sneakers in the world. In 2021, you had to enter raffles or find marked up shoes on the resale market in order to get a pair of Dunks.

And then things changed. Nike started producing massive amounts of Dunk variations to take advantage of consumer demand. But they saturated the market and people got tired of the Dunks.

Shoes are like other products — people aren’t really buying the materials. They’re buying into a brand. They’re buying into a story. And for sneakers specifically, they’re buying into cultural relevance.

Nike has been losing the game of cultural relevance against not only their key rival Adidas, but a host of other competitors like New Balance, ASICS, and Puma.

The rare Nike Dunks and other hyped Nike sneakers, will still be in high demand, but these shoes primarily served the purpose of developing a brand halo effect.

The limited edition shoes didn’t drive meaningful revenue for Nike on their own, but they helped make the brand cool and convinced people to buy shoes like the Dunks. And that’s not working anymore.

Walk into any footwear retailer and you’ll find Dunks in all sizes. And behind the scenes, retailers have been telling Nike that demand has been going down.

With their new CEO, Nike is expecting Dunk sales to decrease by 70% over the next two years as both demand goes down and Nike’s Dunk production goes down.

This is an acknowledgement that even Nike, arguably the coolest and most culturally relevant brand in the world, lost touch with their customer base. And now they’re paying for it.

Nike is an example of when a brand thinks they’re just selling products and and forgets that they are selling a connection to culture.