How NIKE outsmarts everyone and how any brand can do it!

Well, it just takes brands to capture a collective human inspiration and wrap it around a powerful story.

“Greatness is no more unique to us than breathing. We are all capable of it. All of us”- says Nike ‘Find your greatness’ campaign. The campaign ran on the eve of London Olympic and featured places around the world named ‘London’ except the official venue London of England, eventually working around the rules of Olympic committee reserving the advertising right in the city that hosts the game for the official sponsor, which was the arch-rival Adidas.

The idea of the campaign was that very ordinary people, not just perfectly shaped athlete, can achieve greatness and encourage them to find their defining moments of greatness through sports. “Because greatness is not in some special place or in some special person”, the campaign noted, “greatness is where somebody is trying to find it”. It featured people- imperfect, flawed, fat, emaciated- who came out their comfort zone and took steps they always wanted to achieve their greatness and thus the campaign eventually captured the Olympic spirit of greatness.

The campaign generated 4,30,000 mentions in twitter and 10 million plus views of the featured videos in youtube within a short span of time. 63% of the people interviewed after the campaign thought Nike was the official Olympic sponsor indicating how it outplayed Adidas which spent millions of dollar, but fell flat to take advantage of them.

What was in it that gave it such a riveting scale and garnered huge public attention, ultimately turning people to become an advocate of the campaign and the brand? Nike simply captured collective human inspiration and packaged it around a powerful story that people followed. It made us rethink what greatness means and convinced us that greatness can be achieved by anyone. As human being, irrespective of caste, creed, race and religion, we are motivated by certain things that inspire us to achieve greater things in life. It is this things that great brands identify and provide people a platform to express what great things they want to achieve in life, work for it, share passion and feelings with others and take pride in themselves. Because this is so fundamental to our own selves, we immediately love the idea, share it, talk about it and make it a success.

If there’s at least one key takeaway lesson from the campaign, it is that brands are not about what they do, but what they enable people to do.