Phoebe

  In recent years, customers have become more and more fastidious and wiser in purchasing and evaluating brands, therefore, several organizations and enterprises have to be more creative in promotion by adding values or spreading out messages through their products or services. Campaign is used as tactics in order to help companies raise brand awareness, launch new products and appeal to customers in a more meaningful way. On 6 May 2017, Nike held a campaign called Breaking2 to break the two-hour barrier for the marathon and it attracted millions of audiences to watch the event. Although Breaking2 is nominated to be a Campaign of the Year, there are also several controversial comments about the campaign. This essay is going to examine how successful and failure of the Breaking2 in order to give several recommendations to enhance more effectively. 

 

   In 2017, Nike held a marathon campaign in Italy called Breaking2, which aimed to break the 2-hour record of the world. With the slogan “Impossible”, the campaign would like to push human performance to unlimited and spread the message of nothing is impossible. To conduct the event, Nike recruited and created a team including three candidates for a private race. At the end of the race, Eliud Kipchoge nearly broke the world record with a time of 2:00:25. According to page Centaurmedia (2017), in this team, every runner was supposed to wear Nike’s new product - the racing shoe called Zoom Vaporfly Elite. The new product was announced to have the function of reducing the needed energy by 4 percent. Besides, the hydration strategy and a rota of pacers were also utilized to increase the potential of candidates. After the Breaking2 Campaign, Nike received many positive compliments from the media and it also reached the intended goal which was raising awareness of Zoom Vaporfly Elite among people. Due to Hobbs (2017), Breaking2 can be evaluated as one of the pioneers succeeded in launching products by holding a must-watch sports marketing event. Nevertheless, the company also faced many different criticisms from experts and netizens. 

 

   There are many key elements that make Breaking2 successful in helping Nike launch its new shoe product. Firstly, in order to attract the audience coming to the marathon, Nike strongly invested in three elite runners: Eliud Kipchoge, Lelisa Desisa and Zersenay Tadese. According to Eyal (2017), Nike invited the right experts who know what kinds of shoes are the best choice. Moreover, they have many audiences following them around the world. As a result, it is more credible for the audience to notice and trust the wonderful function of Nike’s new product since these runners can a huge impact on consumers’ perspectives. Secondly, the company held the marathon as a challenge for itself since what if the candidates’ performance was too bad to prove any positive element about their product? The campaign seems like a bet and it attracts the audience to attend and wait to see the actual result. Thirdly, the tool used by Nike to promote the campaign is also one of the reasons making the big win. Due to page Digiday (2017), Brandwatch showed the statistics which proved for the successful marketing of the campaign. After the event, until May 2017, Nike has been searched and mentioned for 584,000 times on social media including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. According to a senior data analyst of Brandwatch, netizens also used the hashtag #Breaking2 more than 407,000 times in the same time frame with 87 percent of hashtags had positive opinions. Traditionally, Nike tends to focus on television as the main platform to approach the audience. But with Breaking2, the company utilizes social media as the main tool to promote the campaign. As a result, according to Campaign (2017), the Livestream channel reached nearly eight times more than the number of people watching television in New York, Boston and Chicago. 

 

   Besides the success which Breaking2 has achieved, the campaign also suffers many controversies among the audiences. Fraioli (2016) assumed that Nike was trying to make the marathon a time trial which is the testing of their new product instead of holding it as a race among the candidates. He believes that Nike just using the athletes for its business purpose. In addition, Barker (2016) criticized Nike for holding the race for marketing, rather than for the athletic spirit of the marathon event. Furthermore, the way that Nike holds the race as a bet on three chosen candidates seems to be a huge risk since it could become a failed campaign if those runners finishing the race with a longer time than the one Kipchoge achieved in the race. The mentioned criticism and limitation may become noticeable considerations when Nike initiates other campaigns in the future.

In order to decrease the number of criticism, Breaking2 is suggested to open for everyone including other professional runners and normal people. This method can make the race more competitive and have more athletic spirit in the event. As a result, it could be more meaningful and acceptable to the audience. 

 

   In conclusion, the Breaking2 campaign of Nike deserves to be nominated as the Campaign of the Year since it has succeeded in spreading the messages to motivate people’s performance and making a product launch a must-see event. However, the campaign is commented on in some negative way from the critics and Nike also seems to place a bet on the candidates to break the world’s record. Hence, the campaign still has to enhance by several recommendations to become more comprehensive in the public’s perspective.