The Experience is the Brand (Nike Screws Up)
Two weeks ago, Nike saw their 5th annual Nike Women’s Marathon – their feel-good, fund-raising, female-empowerment branding event – turn into a bit of a publicity nightmare.
There were over 20,000 competitors in Sunday’s Nike Women’s Marathon in San Francisco. And 24-year-old Arien O’Connell, a fifth-grade teacher from New York City, ran the fastest time of any of the women.
But she didn’t win. (At Women’s Marathon, Fastest time didn’t win, SF Chronicle)
For those unfamiliar with road races, the “elite start” is fairly common to major races. Road races get a lot of notoriety from attracting big talent. Two of the carrots that race organizers dangle to get that talent are prize money, and a clear start free from having to weave around hundreds or thousands of slower runners in your path.
The gun goes off and a couple dozen really fast, whippet-thin runners sprint off; five to twenty minutes later a second gun goes off for the rest of the field. Most runners aren’t even aware that an “elite” start exists.
Arien O’Connor didn’t consider herself an “elite” runner. With a personal best in the low 3 hour range, there’s no reason why she should have. (Romania’s Constantina Tomescu won in Beijing in 2:26; Great Britain’s Paula Radcliffe holds the world record of 2:15.)
But she had a hell of a race that day! She finished in 2:55, the fastest she had ever run. And as she discovered when Nike started to announce the “winners”, by far the best time of the race.
But when she pointed this out to Nike race officials, they were hardly congratulatory.
“They were just flabbergasted,” O’Connell said. “I don’t think it ever crossed their minds.”
No one seemed exactly sure what to do. The trophies had already been handed out and the official results announced. Now organizers seem to be hoping it will all go away.
“At this point,” Nike media relations manager Tanya Lopez said Monday, “we’ve declared our winner.” (At Women’s Marathon, Fastest time didn’t win, SF Chronicle)
Nike made two mistakes.
The first mistake: They failed to anticipate what was not a particularly unlikely scenario: what if someone in the non-elite pack has a faster time than the elites?
The appropriate answer would not have necessarily benefitted O’Connell. In fact, the U.S. Association of Track and Field wouldn’t even consider that O’Connell and the elites were running in the same race. Running is an incredibly mental sport, and it’s entirely possible that the elite winner could’ve run faster, even eleven minutes faster, if she had seen O’Connell out there in front of her.
Nike’s proactive response could’ve been to make it very clear that these were two separate races and that prize money was only open to the elite pack – to basically print in block letters “If you think you can win, apply to classify yourself as elite.” (Applying entails submitting finishing times from other races.)
Or they could’ve offered two sets of prizes – again, reinforcing that these are two separate races, each with its’ own set of winners.
But wait, remember what I said before about O’Connell not having any reason to consider herself elite?
The second mistake: They failed to question their own assumption: does it make sense for us to offer an elite start?
Nike overlooked a few critical facts:
Fact one: The Nike Women’s Marathon is held two weeks prior to the world-famous, highly prestigious New York Marathon. The best runners in the world spend months training for New York. Two weeks prior, they are tapering their running distance and resting in anticipation – not racing!
Fact two: the Nike Women’s Marathon is heavily associated with the charitable organization Team In Training.
Team In Training raises lots of money for disease research, which is great. They also take thousands of otherwise sedentary people and train and empower them to complete a marathon, which is also great. What it does not do, however, is to turn out a field of zippy, highly competitive runners.
It didn’t make sense for Nike to offer an elite start at all. And they could’ve anticipated this before they even opened up the race for registrations.
Even after the registration were opened, they could have noticed “Hmmm, our elites aren’t that elite. Does this still make sense?” and decided to eliminate the separate start. But no one asked, or no one followed through.
Several major newspaper articles, thousands of messages on Runner’s World and the USATF forums, and a lot of brand damage later, Nike recanted and declared O’Connell a winner. And next year, no elite field.
So it all turned out okay. But it all could’ve been avoided with a simple willingness to ask questions and take a pre-mortem approach.
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Tags: brand, customers, experience
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