Raking it in

Nike rakes in $3 billion after Colin Kaepernick calls foul on shoe [Denver Post]

We have written about the Colin Kaepernick / Nike saga before. It was the headliner for our inaugural piece that discussed how winning in a Widening Gyre requires politicians, companies and people to control their own Cartoon – before someone else does it for them. Nike did it, and they won.

Some few months later, they’re back in the Zeitgeist, with coverage language powerfully connected to all other social and financial news. I think you can make a meta-game argument that their tactic this go around was a bit transparent. Maybe even long-term counterproductive, given some internal inconsistencies in the cartoon they’re created. What you can’t do, I think, is argue that it wasn’t effective in promoting and controlling that same, highly effective, polarizing cartoon today.

One of the easiest ways to spot a well-controlled cartoon is how it auto-tunes others’ perceptions to that Narrative. The Denver Post gives us exactly that:

Remember, this is at the top of our Zeitgeist query. This language is making its way across financial media. Whatever we think about the reality or fairness of Nike’s decision or Kaepernick’s belief here, the narrative about Nike is that its wokeapitalism strategy is working. Outlets are attributing market price changes over a couple days to a specific event. Outlets are calling day-to-day volatility in total market cap ‘raking it in’, which says about as much as it does for financial literacy as it does the strength of the cartoon. Articles are even intimating that Nike is winning from the popularity of protest actions (and they may not be wrong):

The simplest takeaway from our first brief on this topic was that controlling your cartoon is an indispensable corporate tool in the widening gyre. The takeaway from this one is probably more important: there is now a strong narrative that controlling your cartoon works. A cartoon about cartoons now sits at the top of the Zeitgeist.

Don’t be surprised, friends. The world we live in is now the kind of world in which Jar Jar Binks is trending on social media because…well, because everyone wanted to know why Jar Jar Binks was trending on social media.

Alas, I fear it’s Jar Jars all the way down. Brace yourself for more of this.