Brand impulse gone wrong? Nike’s Boston Marathon ad campaign was a risk it shouldn’t have taken

Nike seems to have missed this lesson from Marketing 101. In the run up to the Boston Marathon on Monday, an advertisement in the window of a store along the city’s Newbury Street read “Runners welcome, walkers tolerated.”

The copy came across as completely at odds with the company’s “Just Do It” tagline, a call to action that in the company’s own words is “a challenge to start, to try, to move forward even when it’s hard.”

This was just one ad, directed at a very specific market, but it seized the news cycle because it underlines Nike’s struggles with its brand identity at a moment when the world’s largest sportswear company can least afford it.

In October 2024, the company brought back former longtime Nike executive Elliott Hill to turn around the ailing athletic shoe and apparel maker, which has seen its stock price tumble some 75% since peaking in November 2021 and its operating income shrink by almost 50%.

Hill’s fixes, including returning Nike to its roots in sports and mending its relationships with wholesalers, are taking longer to gain traction than management and investors would like.

Since 31 March, when the company said revenue is likely to decline for the current quarter and the rest of the year, the stock has dropped 15%, bringing its year-to-date losses to almost 30%.

The Boston marketing misstep—coming from what’s supposed to be one of corporate America’s most astute and powerful brand builders—is not going to persuade Wall Street that Nike understands what it is.

“This shows the broader confusion with the brand,” says Americus Reed, marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “That’s the more disturbing part.”

The backlash to the ad was so swift that before runners had even hit the course Nike replaced it with, “Boston will always remind you, movement is what matters.” It added in a statement, “We want more people to feel welcome in running—no matter their pace, experience, or the distance.”

Next came the backlash to the backlash. The Boston Marathon is the world’s most prestigious for recreational runners with its entry based on strict qualifying times. It’s just a matter of fact that it’s not an event for walkers, some argued. Nike, they said, had caved to snowflakes.

Historically, Nike has had no problem courting controversy (see the Colin Kaepernick partnership). But the Boston ad wasn’t just controversial; it was antithetical to what the Nike brand is supposed to stand for.

The company’s business has been built on enlarging the tent of who gets labelled an athlete. The mantra of its co-founder, Bill Bowerman, that “If you have a body, you’re an athlete,” is embedded in Nike’s mission statement. Its tagline is very intentionally “Just Do It,” not “Only Do It If You’re Going to Win.”

But marketing yourself as an inclusive brand has gotten harder in today’s business climate. Christine Day, one-time CEO of Lululemon, told me that she is a fan of Hill and agrees with his moves to fix Nike, but added that finding a brand voice is especially hard for big companies at the moment.

“We’re living in a time of what I would call a masculine swing,” says Day, who is now a brand consultant. “The power of exclusion, or ‘I’m better’—that voice resonates with a lot of customers.” As such, aspirational, positive brands can get labelled as woke, she says.

Recent moves by Nike make its “walkers tolerated” line feel less like a one-off mistake and more like a signal. Marketing experts told Front Office Sports that Nike’s move toward a “hard” and “spikier” brand identity is part of its attempt to win back the serious runners it lost to upstarts.

Earlier this month, Nike also faced criticism for a billboard at a free park run in London that read, “You didn’t come all this way for a walk in the park.” Nike is “missing how the running market has evolved,” Lee Glandorf, who writes a newsletter about sports style, told the outlet.

Nike’s rivals have seized on the company’s shift—and it is resonating. Asics countered with its own billboard in Boston: “Runners. Walkers. All Welcome.” Shoe company Altra posted on social media, “Run. Walk. Crawl. No matter how you do it, just stay out there.” Even before Nike’s Boston flub, Swiss brand On was running a ‘soft wins’ campaign that featured Elmo.

While Nike plays with a voice that sounds more exclusionary, its competitors are claiming the kind of accessibility that the brand one embodied. It risks losing not just market share, but the voice that once defined the brand. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering corporate America.