My neighbor has had a flag out since Monday and a Nike box on his porch since Tuesday, and I have thought about both more than a holiday week should require. Nike pulled the Air Max 1 with the thirteen star Betsy Ross flag on the heel after Colin Kaepernick told the company the design carried history he did not want on anyone's feet.
By Wednesday a governor had yanked financial incentives from a planned Nike plant in Arizona, and half the internet had developed strong opinions about the Revolutionary War.
The two readings on offer are that Nike caved to a mob, or that Nike bravely took a stand. Both readings assume the decision was hard.
It was not hard. It was arithmetic.
Nike did not fold to pressure and it did not find its conscience this week. It counted its customers, and the people yelling were not on the list.
Remember last September. Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. People filmed themselves burning shoes. The stock wobbled for two days and then closed at a record, the quarter came in fine, and the brand walked off with a decade of goodwill from the customer it actually sells to: young, urban, online. That was the choice. Everything since has been bookkeeping.
So when the panels ask whether Nike got scared, they are asking about the wrong fear. Nike was not scared of the backlash. Nike was scared of losing the man whose name is on the campaign that just worked. Weigh those two costs honestly and the shoe comes off the truck by lunch.
Here is where brands go wrong trying to copy this. They decide the lesson is take a stand, so they take one, loudly, in a category nobody asked them about, and then spend eighteen months in a war room every time somebody objects. The real lesson is quieter. Choose your customer first, in public, on purpose, and let the decisions fall out of that choice without convening anybody. The reason Nike could move in a day is that the hard conversation happened last year.
Patagonia has this. It sued a sitting president over public lands, and this spring it stopped putting corporate logos on vests for finance clients. It lost business both times and gained the thing that matters. The vest customers were never the point.
It was not hard. It was arithmetic.
I walked to Salt & Straw yesterday in a rain that could not commit, and the line was out the door on the Fourth, which is very Portland. Two people ahead of me were arguing about the sneaker. Neither of them was buying it either way. That is most of this argument, most of the time: an audience of people who were never customers, deciding very loudly about a product they were never going to own.