Taking 'Just Do It' to a different conclusion
How Nike attempts to balance messaging with reality.
Welcome back. Hope you had a relaxing and safe Thanksgiving.
Back in June, as companies showed their support for Black Lives Matter, we talked about how brands need to look into their own affairs before glomming onto movements or ideas that could diminish the effect of their grandstanding.
After Nike ran the ad below, we highlighted how a company that aligns itself with a movement, one laced with good intentions, has to also address where it falls short of its own messaging goals. That whole those who live in glass houses cliche.
The company also has a long history of being on the wrong side of history. From child labor issues in the 1980s and 1990s, to its 2007 $7.6 million settlement of a racial discrimination lawsuit, to 2018’s big gender discrimination class action lawsuit, the company is often caught between ‘do as I say, not as I do.’
This Business Insider headline tells a story: “Inside Nike: Sources share claims of sexism, cheating, abuse, at the world’s wokest brand.”
Nike continues to use the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in its Twitter heading.
But as we know, life is not black and white.
This brings us to today. The New York Times reports that Nike and several other international companies, like Coca-Cola and Apple, are lobbying Congress to water down a bill
that would ban imported goods made with forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region, according to congressional staff members and other people familiar with the matter, as well as lobbying records that show vast spending on the legislation.
...
Lobbyists have fought to water down some of its provisions, arguing that while they strongly condemn forced labor and current atrocities in Xinjiang, the act’s ambitious requirements could wreak havoc on supply chains that are deeply embedded in China.
In other words: these companies are against forced labor, but only to the point that it doesn’t hurt their bottom line. How does a company reconcile the millions of dollars it spends on messaging that BlackLivesMatter, that society needs to be better, with the hundreds of thousands of dollars it spends on lobbying against a bill that ultimately focuses on human rights?
In early November, the UK Parliament held hearings “to determine the extent to which business in the UK are exploiting the forced labor of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China.”
The BBC and others reported that
There have been a number of reports alleging that thousands of Muslims from China's Uighur minority group are working under coercive conditions at factories that supply some of the world's biggest brands.
Some of those brands: The North Face, Dell, Apple, Patagonia, and Nike. Many of which were quick to the draw in support of BlackLivesMatter.
Back in the states, the NYT reports that
In the first three quarters of 2020, Nike spent $920,000 on in-house lobbying of Congress and other federal agencies. Disclosures do not break down expenditures by topic, but show Nike lobbied on matters including physical education grants, taxes and climate change, as well as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
Nike told the NYT that it “did not lobby against” the legislation, instead offering up it had “constructive discussions.”
The NYT calls B.S.
Asked about the allegations of forced labor, Nike referred to a statement in March in which it said that it did not source products from Xinjiang and that it had confirmed that its suppliers were not using textiles or yarn from the region.
Nike said that the Qingdao factory had stopped hiring new workers from Xinjiang in 2019, and that an independent audit confirmed there were no longer employees from there at the facility.
(According to a report published in March by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute that cited state media, the factory employed around 800 Uighur workers at the end of 2019 and produced more than seven million pairs of shoes for Nike each year.)
In March, The Washington Post ran an op-ed from an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute:
Based on our information, The Post’s Anna Fifield visited a shoe factory in Qingdao producing sneakers for Nike and found that it resembled a prison, with barbed wire, watchtowers, surveillance cameras and a dedicated police station. Uighur workers at the factory, she was told, did not come on their own accord, nor could they return home for the holidays.
Nike gets adulating press for its commercials and messages of support for BlackLivesMatter, aligning itself with the movement, but also its faces—Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James, each who have lengthy big dollar deals with the company.
But as the company pushes this message of ending systemic racism in the U.S., it makes money off of forced labor from systemic racism in China. It would be a good time for Kaepernic and James to put pressure on Nike, whether publicly through messages or privately through “constructive discussions,” to make amends.
A message is only as strong as the perception of the narrator. Nike has become an unreliable narrator in societal issues, and based on its sales (fiscal 2021 Q1 reporting: $10.6 billion in revenue; in 2020, it brought in $37.4 billion) consumers either don’t know or don’t care about the gulf between what the company says and what it does. Perhaps they should.
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The Chambers Brothers, “The Time Has Come Today”
Some interesting links:
For Trumpian media:
The King of Trump TV Thinks You’re Dumb Enough to Buy It (NYT)
For ad agencies:
Behind the decline of the world’s oldest ad agency (Business Insider)
For inside a newsroom:
Where the headlines are made: inside newsrooms around the world - in pictures (The Guardian)
For media profiles:
Bon Appétit needs to change. Its new editor in chief is ready for the challenge (CNN)
For platforms:
98 Million TikTok Followers Can’t Be Wrong (The Atlantic)
For marketers:
Why age-gender demos survive in a marketing world that wants to move on (Ad Age)
For media criticism:
Sorry, CNN. Trump voters don’t deserve “sympathy” (Press Run)