Page 176 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

New Media Sportscapes: Branding and the Internet • 165

Lury (2004: 27) concluded, therefore, that the brand is ‘a mechanism—or medium—
for the construction of supply and demand . . . It is not simply an add-on, a mark to

identify an origin that is fixed. Instead, it is an abstract machine for the reconfi gura-
tion of production.’

Positioning the Sport Brand

Lury (2004) argued that traditional approaches to advertising—persuading someone
to buy something—have been superseded by brand positioning. Consumers have
been conceptualised as in search of meaning, which the brand supplies. Advertisers
no longer take consumers’ conscious accounts of their needs and desires as good in-
dicators for predicting their future behaviour. As an example of this trend, Lury cited
an account of the story of Sony’s successful launch of portable television, followed
by the Walkman personal stereo. On the basis of market survey results, a similar
product was previously rejected by General Electric on the grounds that consumers
said that portability was a low priority. Sony, however, looked at consumer behaviour
in their homes and anticipated that portability would suit existing usage patterns
(Julier, as cited in Lury 2004).
Something similar could be seen to be at work in the launch of Nike’s campaigns
to target female consumers. In Britain in the early 1990s, the market for women’s

sporting footwear was dominated by sales of aerobics/fitness shoes, with Reebok
having the vast majority of the market share (70 per cent) followed by Nike (8 per
cent; Boydell 1996). Gender differentiation of product lines was made primarily by
colour, which, for women’s shoes, was ‘white with pink, purple or lilac trim’, and for
men, ‘black, navy blue, green and red’ (Boydell 1996: 123). In both the United King-
dom and the United States, female consumers represented the largest upward trend
in the market for sporting goods in the 1990s (Boydell 1996; Goldman and Papson
1998). To take advantage of this upsurge of interest, Nike developed advertising
strategies that did not simply attempt to sell goods to women on the basis of what
market research indicated they wanted to buy (pastel-coloured aerobics shoes). In-
stead, Nike branded female sport participation by transferring desires for physical
liberation onto their sporting goods.
Goldman and Papson (1998) documented Nike’s ‘Empathy’ campaigns, which at-
tempted to tap into women’s anxieties about their bodies and traditional, restrictive
gender identities. Text from advertisements in the United States presented contradic-
tions in women’s relationships with conventional femininity: ‘you do not have to be
your mother’ (Goldman and Papson 1998: 127). An advertisement in the United King-
dom presented a group of naked women standing together with the strapline, ‘It’s
not the shape you are, it’s the shape you’re in that matters’ (Boydell 1996: 128). By
completing the circuit of the advertisement’s meaning system, the female consumer
acknowledged that insecurities were the perpetual domain of feminine identity. Nike,