How Nike encouraged Hong Kong’s youth to ‘own the night’
During summer holidays when school is out, Hong Kong’s youth audiences find themselves with more time on their hands. Nike wanted to leverage this opportunity to reach out and encourage this audience set to participate in the brand’s summer campaign. The agency to help achieve the objective is Razorfish.
Unlike their Western counterparts, to Hong Kong youth, the summer holidays mean more time to do the same old activities. With limited activities and Hong Kong’s scorching heat, most of them settle for an indoor routine: shopping, going to the movies, going to restaurants, and most commonly, spending time on the internet.
Nike decided to take on the challenge of getting this group, who prefer passive living, out of their comfort zone, get active and ‘own the night’.
The Brief
Nike’s ‘Own the Night’ is a series of sporting events that transforms the city into a nocturnal playground for sports during the night. These nocturnal sports are not activities that Hong Kong youths usually associate with summer holidays.
Nike was confident of its ability to deliver great offline experiences with the Own the Night events.
The big challenge for Razorfish was how to successfully spread the word about the Own the Night events, and most importantly mobilise Hong Kong youth, who would most likely not be motivated by a night time sport event during the summer.
The Insight
To really entice this target audience, the agency had to build social relevance for sport. “We couldn’t rely on the physicality of sport being attractive, particularly not in the heat of summer. Knowing that our target audience isn’t a hardcore athlete, we decided to make sports the new hot social activity, the perfect social event for Hong Kong youth to gather and have fun,” explained a company statement.
By positioning the events as social activities, Nike made sports less daunting to its target audience. Sport is no longer a task, but an exciting, fun, and most importantly social experience.
However, building great experiences isn’t enough. The sports brand needed to reach out to the target in channels that matter to them most and where they are most likely to go when they are thinking of socialising.
Mobile became an indispensable channel to tap into the target audience’s social life. Hong Kong youth did not only use mobile to connect with one another, it is also their go-to device to find out updates and to share content they deem worthy. In order to successfully recruit them, Nike had to tap into their existing social behaviours around mobile.
The Execution
To bring the strategy to life two social channels amongst this set of target consumers were tapped: WeChat and Facebook. By tapping into these channels, Nike was able to successfully promote its offline events and spread the word on channels that mattered to its target audience.
Razorfish developed a hub that lets the audience to check out and enroll into various sports activities. Users can also directly communicate with a dedicated team of representatives through this hub. To make them unforgettable, Nike invited celebrities, local sports players, and even NBA star Kobe Bryant to play together with them.
To ensure the participating youth spread the word using their own platforms, Nike made it easy for them to check-in at the sport grounds and create a pledge with their own statement to share among their friends. Additionally, a built-in photo app was also included with filters to let the audiences capture the moments, and which could then be printed at Nike retail stores, completing the journey from online to actual stores.
The Results
On behalf of Nike, Razorfish Hong Kong broke new ground on two fronts for the summer campaign, Own the Night. Not only did the team manage to get thousands of Hong Kong youth playing sport in the peak of summer, but also left a legacy on social media platform WeChat by creating five new functionalities. This campaign allowed Nike to be the first brand in Hong Kong to roll out the new WeChat menu bar.
In one month (July to August), the WeChat fan number and engagement rates was tremendously boosted to 16,489. More than 13,896 messages from participants were processed.
Furthermore, the agency produced 15,053 Nike stickers. The campaign website received a total of 484,168 pages views and reached 226,106 unique visitors.
Night illuminates new possibilities to move.
