The contingency of corporate political advocacy: Nike’s ‘dream crazy’ campaign with Colin Kaepernick

Abstract

An emerging field of research views Corporate Political Advocacy (CPA) as a communication strategy that responds to the challenges of public relations in divided societies. CPA takes a political position in public and, by doing so, appears to deliberately alienate some of its stakeholders. This study challenges the assumption that CPA discards a unifying epideictic rhetoric in favour of agonistic politics. The investigated case is Nike’s Dream Crazy campaign starring American football player Colin Kaepernick, whose protest against race discrimination in the United States sparked a heated public debate. Although the critical analysis of the campaign and responses on Twitter reveal deep political cleavages, Nike is concurrently engaged in unchallenged communication praising the hyper-individualism of a market ideology. The epideictic contingency of Nike’s CPA undermines the social cause ostensibly at the heart of the campaign: the fight against racial discrimination.

Brand bravery: conceptualization, scale development and validation

“…Marketing scholars have predominantly focused on the brand's CSR image and reputation in leading to positive marketing outcomes (Yoon et al, 2006;Kim and Woo, 2019). Recent concepts such as brand activism (Mukherjee and Althuizen, 2020) and advocacy (Hoffmann et al, 2020) have emerged that draw insights about how a brand's actions and communication can alter consumer perception and influence its reputation. The current study expands this growing body of knowledge by focusing on a particular dimensional impact of reputation and explains how being brave can be the future of brands.…”

“…However, branding literature has no explicit reference to brave personality, its characteristics, and whether it could attract consumer attention. Some recent studies have discussed actions similar to Nike's Kaepernick campaign under brand activism (Mukherjee and Althuizen, 2020), and corporate social/political advocacy (Frynas et al, 2017;Hoffmann et al, 2020;Park and Jiang, 2020). Corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature also covers some ground in this context by discussing brands' voluntary activities to fulfill their obligations to various stakeholders, communities, and society (Coombs and Holladay, 2011;He and Harris, 2020).…”

A theory of corporate responsibility to race (CRR): communication and racial justice in public relations

“…There are also risks. Corporations communicating about social justice issues, especially when it comes to race, can face intense criticism (Ciszek & Logan, 2018;Hoffmann et al, 2020;Logan, 2016;Novak & Richmond, 2019), and CRR provides no easy solution. CRR is a starting point rather than an ending point, and it may even introduce more questions than answers.…”

“…The growing trend of corporations communicating about social justice issues such as race (see Ciszek & Logan, 2018;Edelman, 2020;Hoffmann, Nyborg, Averhoff, & Olesen, 2020;Kim, Overton, Bhalla, & Li, 2020;Logan, 2016Logan, , 2019Novak & Richmond, 2019;Wilcox, 2019;Zheng, 2020) means that there is an array of opportunities to explore the corporate responsibility to race theoretical framework. The opportunities to engage in CRR research are aided by the fact that CRR can be proactive or reactive, can be directed to internal and external publics, and can potentially take various forms.…”

Silence has no place: a framing analysis of corporate statements about racial inequity, immigration policy and LGBTQ rights

“…3). Other notable terms are corporate social advocacy (Dodd and Supa, 2014), corporate political advocacy (Hoffmann et al. , 2020), political CSR (Scherer and Palazzo, 2010), sociopolitical activism (Hambrick and Wowak, 2019) and sociopolitical involvement (Nalick et al.…”