#assignment_5

As the world’s largest producer and one of the most popular brands of athletic apparel and equipment (See: Statista), Nike’s success could be attributed to its marketing and advertising campaigns. In 2013, it spent more than 1bil USD on advertising in the US. The company spends a massive amount of money each year on marketing and advertising in order to maintain its brand image and popularity among young adults and athletes and has been successful in doing so thus far. 

Among its many categories, we have chosen to focus on Nike Football (or soccer). 

A campaign that we would like to highlight is titled “No Maybes”, launched last year by ad agency Thousands Creative  (See: Source). The campaign was in line with the Women’s World Cup and featured the US Women’s National Team. It showcases the “No Maybes” mentality by showing the team going through harsh and strenuous training even before they step foot on the pitch.

The social media platforms that the campaign utilised includes Youtube (See: Link), Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Ultimately, Nike wishes to promote its football gear and equipment to football athletes, thereby increasing its sales. By making use of the various popular social media platforms, it aims to increase its reach in the most effective manner; in particular, I believe Nike’s intended audience is young female athletes/football players who frequent social media sites, espcially those in America. A unique aspect about the campaign’s video is that it solely features female football players, hence this likely increases the campaign’s appeal towards young female athletes who are able to relate to the players featured. 

An unintended group of audience could possibly be people who support the athletes (fans) but who do not partake in the sport itself. This would not reach its intended consequence of increasing sales as this group of people would not be consumers of Nike’s football-specific products.

Whether or not a campaign will become viral, which is what advertisers hope to achieve when releasing a campaign, depends on the social influence it is able to wield. As the campaign promotes a positive and desirable trait of not doubting oneself, the audience would want to identify with it and appear to have identified with it- this increases the possibility of people sharing the video with their social circle.

As with all campaigns, there could be the potential of inducing unintended effects. A possible unintended consequence could be promoting the interest towards the sport itself, or the sports team/players featured, rather than towards Nike’s products themselves. Hype may be generated with regards to the people seen in the advertisements, but this may not translate to an increase in sales of Nike producs, thus defeating the purpose of the marketing campaign.

A few weeks ago I have written about the JAofNEE campaign and this week I am also going to talk about it. However, in this blog I am only going to focus on the Facebook page of the campaign. In class we have made an analysis of the last 50 post of the JAofNEE Facebook page. By this analysis you can see easily which posts are the most popular and I am going to tell you why I think this post are so successful.

We made the analysis by using the program Gephi and by the Facebook application Netvizz. We used Netvizz to gather the data of the last 50 posts of the JAofNEE Facebook page. When you open this data in Gephi, it looks really messy and everything has the same color. So we first differentiate the users and posts of the users on the page from the posts of the page itself. To make the data less messy, we have clustered the data and we made the popular nodes bigger. You can see the results of these changes in the image below.

In this image you can clearly see which posts are popular and which are less popular. But now don’t know which node belongs to which post, so we added the labels of the nodes in the graph. 

This image is now very messy and unclear. So we have removed all the names of the users, because they are irrelevant for this analysis, and we have numbered all the posts of the page itself as well as the posts of some users. These changes resulted in the next image.

Now it is a really clear graph, but we have made one more change and that was the change that we gave all the clusters a different color. Now you can differentiate each cluster of users and posts from each other.

As you can see in the image above, the purple cluster at the top of the graph is the biggest cluster. So we can conclude that post 7 is the most popular post of the last 50 post of the JAofNEE Facebook page. This post is about the coming Donorweek and the page is asking people if they want to talk about donor registration with friends and family or if they want to agitate in this week. You can see the specific post below.

I think this is the most popular post, because it is about the action week of the whole campaign. I think that there are people who are always busy with and thinking about the topic, because they know for example someone who needs a donor. These people will be always reading about the topic and they will be liking most of the things of the JAofNEE Facebook page. This has to do with social identity theory. In this theory, a social idenity is a person’s knowledge that he or she belongs to a social category (Hogg & Abrams, as cited in Stets & Burke, 2000, p. 225). People who know someone who needs a donor, belong to the group of people who recruit donors. But the  Donorweek appeals to many people, who are for one week agitate to bring the topic under the attention. So if the Facebook page is posting about the Donorweek there will be much interaction under this post.

Another thing that is striking about the graph, is the cluster at the bottom. This cluster is mainly separated from the rest of the graph. The reason for this is that the post is from an user and the post is about the fact that she has participated in a running competition with a sport shirt of JAofNEE. This post is separated from the graph, because of the fact that mostly friends of her have liked or reacted on her post. These friends of her are not in the rest of the network of the Facebook page.

Other popular posts are for example about The World Transplant Games (post 8); the question if you are a donor yet (post 40); a girl with the age of 12 years old who already wanted to register herself as a donor (post 37); the Donorweek again (post 2); and real life stories from people who are ill and need a donor or from people who agitate for donors (post 20, 23 and 24).

References:

Stets, J. E., & Burke, P. J. (200). Identity theory and social identity theory. Social Psychology Quarterly, 63(3), 224 – 237.