How Nike Sold Me These Shoes Without Serving Me A Single Ad
And 3 marketing principles you can steal...
How would it feel to sell your product without a customer seeing any marketing material from you?
Pretty cool, right?
Thought so. Today, I'm going to break down one of my own recent buying decisions to show you just how powerful organic social can be in driving purchases.
Specifically, we'll highlight 3 marketing principles (you'll want to remember these) that drove my decision.
But first, what did I buy?
In short, I bought this new pair of Nike Blazers. I needed a new pair of white sneakers. The interesting part is how I decided on this pair.
See, much of my TikTok FYP has become either:
Fitness TikTok
Fashion TikTok
At the intersection, there's one creator that centers his account around fire gym outfits — his name is Marshall Crews. As someone who is learning more about fashion (after years of wearing basketball shorts and poor-fitting t-shirts) this is crazy helpful.
And which shoes made repeat appearances in his videos?
You guessed it — Nike Blazers.
That said, the initial creator didn't sell me on the shoes right away. I then started to notice the shoes being recommended by multiple influencers on the app.
Then I took another step of searching "best white shoes 2021" on YouTube. I think you see where this is going — the Blazers made list after list.
And not once had I seen an ad for them by Nike, or even visited the official Nike social pages.
After a few weeks of thinking about it, I finally decided to buy them.
Side note — would highly recommend. The shoes are 🔥.
Now let's break down the marketing lessons you can pull from my shoe shopping experience...
1) Buyer intent matters.
Understand this: People want to believe they make their own decisions.
Yes, direct-to-offer ads (i.e. "buy this now for 50% off) work. I'm not debating that.
But, people like feeling in control of their own decisions. In this case, I felt in control of my decision even though I was being sold.
I decided that I was in the market for white shoes.
I shaped my TikTok FYP based on the type of content I wanted to see.
I noticed the Nike Blazers in an organic piece of content — they weren't served to me via ads.
I typed "best white shoes 2021" into the YouTube search bar.
And ultimately, I felt completely in control as I entered my credit card info on the Nike website.
Not once did I feel like I was being coerced into buying. Not once did I feel like I was being hard sold on the product.
Think about that in contrast to walking into a sleazy used car dealership and being verbally assaulted into buying a shitcan of a car you didn't even want.
That said, I can already hear some of the criticism on this take. A minuscule number of brands have the amount of pull that Nike does. That's true, and it likely did make the buyer's journey a bit more seamless.
But, that doesn't discount the power of understanding buyer intent in marketing your product.
If you understand what your audience is looking for, where they're looking for it, and how they're looking for it — you can manufacture a content or influencer strategy to guide your prospect through that buying process, without being too pushy.
That topic alone deserves an entire article for itself.
2) Organic content creates trust.
Why did I feel in control of my buying decision?
Well, the content that I consumed before buying the Blazers functioned as a "recommendation."
The most convincing form of marketing is a genuine recommendation from a friend.
Your friend has nothing to gain from recommending a product to you (unless they're selling Herbalife LOL). So, if they're telling you about a brand, it must be good.
The most convincing marketing content also feels like a recommendation from a friend.
This is much easier said than done, especially from a brand account. But, it's a bit easier to accomplish this as an individual creator. That's how the best are able to make a living off of sponsorship dollars — and a damn good one.
When products are integrated into a creator's usual content, they tend to generate questions.
One trend I've noticed when studying these fashion TikTok creators is that many don't include the brand name of certain pieces in the video itself.
This generates curiosity, and viewers flood the comments wondering:
"What shoes are those?"
"Where'd you get that shirt from?"
"What's that jacket called?"
This generates engagement for the creator and feeds the algorithm, but it also creates curiosity and interest around the product itself.
So, if you have a genuinely great product and you get it in front of the right audience through a trustworthy source (i.e. a create with authority/trust in your niche), you're in good shape.
3) Social proof makes everything easier.
Buyers want to minimize risk in their purchases.
And one of the best ways to minimize risk is to look at others who have bought the product. This is why testimonials are so, so important.
At this point, brands are paying influencers to create "testimonial style" videos, or even using employees to create them in-house.
But, it's not just about testimonials. Organic influencer content, like the gym fit TikToks and YouTube videos I've mentioned, also function as social proof.
This type of social proof is more powerful than a random testimonial, because there's already inherent trust given to that influencer (remember point #2).
Think about it like this:
If a random dude at the YMCA was trying to give you pointers on how to shoot a basketball better, you probably wouldn't trust his advice.
But, if Kobe Bryant gave you that same advice, you're taking it without the need for extra verification (as you should 🐐).
If a brand has a product void of testimonials, it looks kinda sketchy.
If a brand had a product customers (and influencers) are raving about, the buyer doesn’t believe that the purchase is a huge risk. The product is proven already.
A caveat here is that audience size doesn't equate to more trust. There are plenty of smaller influencers who have deep relationships with their audiences — and plenty of massive influencers who are painfully out of touch. Proceed carefully.
An important note.
There's one piece of the intro that I hope you didn't skim over.
"After a few weeks of thinking about it, I finally decided to buy them."
Buying decisions take time.
Marketing thought leaders love to throw out numbers to quantify this, like "it takes 37.5 touchpoints for someone to buy."
The exact number is less important than understanding that it does take time.
So don't rush the buyer's journey.
Create content and collaborations that help move them along that journey, at the pace they see fit.
Ultimately, they'll buy when they're ready — and be glad they did.
Before you go, a quick question — are there any topics we covered today that you'd like a deeper look at? Influencer partnerships? Content for different steps of the buyer's journey? Let me know, and I'd likely be down to put out a full piece on the topic (in case study format, per usual 😉).
👋🏻 Pull up a seat, stay a while.
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Talk to you next Monday,
Tommy
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How Nike Sold Me These Shoes Without Serving Me A Single Ad
All excellent observations. Question: How much of the shoes' "organic," self-directed appeal centered on that lovely swoosh and the decades (and billions of dollars) of meaning it confers on a pair of white sneakers?