There's an interesting conversation going on right now on Brian Morrissey's blog, around his "the nike human race fiasco" story. A guy from Nike is part of the convo, too, and on my part, I wrote a comment, excerpts of which are repeated here. At the end of his post, Nike guy lamented how it is "amazing how quickly a brand can build a negative perception, and how difficult it is to build perception after the fall." Okaaay. The thing was, that people who complained on the blog were not talking about their negative perceptions, but about their negative experiences with the various components of the Nike system (shoes, site, sportsband, etc). That is, they were talking about actual, real-life, first-hand experiences with the brand. They were not talking about Nike ads, or its slogan, or Nike+ website, or anything else that a brand uses to project a certain perception. They were talking about running. So from this follows that if Nike wants to change its "perception", it actually needs to invest in making the experience better and more relevant for different types of runners and for different types of runs. As is now, the current Nike+ system supports only a specific type of running experience – and a person’s got to have that specific running experience in order to be able to use the system. So, if I don't have *that* experience, the system is useless to me. And this is generally the problem with all closed systems (Nike+ being one of them) -- they break down all too easily & they are good for a limited number of uses only [see adam greenfield's awesome post "on the ground running" for more about "closed-ness" of the Nike+ system]. I suspect that all of this would be totally fine if Nike+ did not claim that they provide super-customization [this being their marketing angle] for all runners. Um, no. If this were true, why are all those long-distance runners complaining? Because they feel = experience (not perceive) that Nike+ is not for them. It is for casual runners (no matter what the claims are). Because casual runners do like to have brand new, fancy shoes, and $15 dollar socks. Serious runners usually have beaten-up gear and are usually emotionally attached to their sneakers they remind them of a specific great achievement (marathon, super-difficult run, etc). Like, just look at the photo above (do those people look like they are wearing anything new&fancy? do they look like they care what they are wearing?). Serious runners replace sneakers mostly when they have to. Casual runners have multiple pairs of sneakers (for different running “events” – with my date, with my friends, for my 10K race). Serious runners usually run alone and pray to god that no one they know sees them. And they don’t listen to music because they run for intrinsic rather than material reasons. E.g. they don’t have a fitness goal, or stress-reduction goal, or any other material goal. Their goals are immaterial – they run for running sake (paul isakson also talked about this in his usual super-smart way, in new balance vs nike ads post). Anyway, all these facets of the experience are relevant to distinguish serious runners from casual ones who are externally motivated. It is surely possible to turn casual runners into serious runners and then into long-distance runners (as Nike claims its goal is) but then they would not use the Nike+ site anymore. B/c their motivation for running will become qualitatively different. They will be running for entirely different reasons than those they started running for. In any event, while its marketing people still think like this: “the more people run, the more miles they put down, then the more stuff they NEED TO BUY” (whoa, the old salesman is back and it creeps me out), it’s going to be more about the brand and less about people who it is supposed to serve. The actual continuation of the sentence should have been “the more people run … the more HELP they need”. That help being shoes, gadgets, and yes, some smooth 10K runs. That’s the reality of branding today: if a brand doesn't help me [to do something better], it doesn't exist for me. As simple as that (and that's why i wear asics when i run).