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One of the more interesting “conspiracy theories” I’ve read was a comment about how athletic / athleisure brands no longer use scenes of competitive dominance in their marketing. Instead of scenes of glorious victory, you find scenes of drills and weightroom practice, occasionally alone or on an empty court. This was a decision to market to those who only occasionally exercise or who purchase the consumer goods as a signal (to themselves or others) that they are athlete-coded. The aspirational messaging can't depict competitive victory because the person who just goes to the gym after work doesn’t compete at all, so the marketing valorizes the act of “progress”, “improvement” alone. They want to feel like they are a “great athlete to be”, in training, rather than a competitor pursuing competitive dominance.
And this relates to that marathon jersey. By producing a cutoff jersey you are delegitimizing the whole attraction to running gear. If a norm of showing off your competitive times through trademarked clothing developed, then putting on Nike running shoes now signals to everyone that you are not athlete coded, but a poser (the skateboarding culture equivalent of wearing vans but unable to kickflip). The consumer is no longer dressing like the high status royal but a Don Quixote. It’s stolen valor.
So I wonder, did the journalistic criticism of this company originate with a brand like Nike? Maybe. But it could have also been a marketing ploy by the company; “people are mad about this” is a way to say “look at this”. I’m more tempted to think the cause is the former, because running magazines likely have major deals with the big giants.
I'd wager it'd just be a pragmatic decision. The majority, wealthiest portion of consumers is 40+ years old, age groups where you can't seriously compete in most sports. People who are both wealthy enough to spend money on competitive sports equipment and in an age range where competition even makes sense are a very small fraction of the population.
I wouldn't be surprised if these brands' marketing started looking more like drug ads 'after my hip-replacement surgery I wasn't sure I would still be able to run, but the new Nike SwiftMax give me just the right amount of support to keep going...'
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"Nike" turning its back on victory sounds very mythologically ominous.
Next thing you’ll tell me is that “Bud Light” is not, in fact, your bud.
I don’t know about you, but Budweiser’s a friend of mine.
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While Nike was named after the Greek goddess of victory (and came out of a company called Blue Ribbon Sports, referring to victory in another way), Budweiser was not named after the concept of being a buddy, nor after a flower bud.
Fine, how about
“Budweiser: neither bud nor wise”?
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Neat observation. I see there's a preponderance of ads not showing competition. Did they ever market victory though? For essentially their entire market, competitive dominance is kayfabe. Sure, you might have a collection of medals or team victories, but that's only because of the competition structure that allows you to compare yourself to a pool of people that are similarly mediocre. If the elite show up you'd quickly see that you barely play the same sport. Worse, for things like long distance running in a populous area, actually winning any event is a 1 in 1000 thing. At best, you're fighting to beat the fucker 10 feet in front of you.
Even among RealMenTM, there is a lot less competitive participation sport for Bowling Alone type reasons.
When I was a kid, the culturally dominant paradigm for male participation sport in the UK was pickup games of football (soccer for you Americans) or basketball and the preferred marketing message was "What you are doing is a facsimile of professional team sports, so you should wear what the pros wear in order to be winning like them."
In the current year, the culturally dominant paradigm for male participation sport (I have no idea how accurate this is, but advertising follows the culture) is "Do you even lift, bro?" strength-based gym culture. Strength training is fundamentally PvE in a way which pickup football (or whatever the American equivalent is) is PvP, but even more so the culture of lifting with your gym bros is one of collaborative self-improvement, not competition. I have aged out of the target audience for sportswear marketing, but if I was marketing activewear to gym bros, I would reflect this change in my marketing messaging.
This is even before we consider the modern trend of selling sportswear to the spectators as athleisure. I notice that the men I see in the streets in traditional casual styles are, on average, in much better shape than the men in athleisure. FWIW I don't think the same is true for women, where athleisure appeals to the "I've got it and I want to flaunt it, and sportswear is an excuse to dress sexy before sunset" crowd.
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That seems like an unnecessarily high standard of what "victory" involves.
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It’s female marketing. Empathy = women like seeing diverse people getting along. Less about victory and more about working out is also feminine.
Female clothing market is bigger than the male market.
Since the change I refuse to buy Nike.
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