The Olympic Neon Yellow Shoe Fetish

August 8, 2012 | Comments Off

If you’ve been watching Olympics track and field and you haven’t noticed the florescent yellow and green shoes, the first thing on your to-do list today should be to visit your opthamologist.

You may have even missed the 9.63 seconds it took for Usain Bolt to capture gold in the men’s 100 meter final, because you were focused on those bright yellow/green shoes that seem to suck you in no matter how hard to try not to look at them. Those shoes are the brain child of Nike, a company that is NOT an official sponsor of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

As you can see from the word cloud based on emotions expressed in social media over the last few days, the most common emotion expressed towards those shoes is positive. Whether people describe it as love, best, awesome, beautiful, or something else, people do love the shoes. Of course, you have to also notice words like shocking, monstrosities, horrified, yuck, wtf, and ugh so it isn’t all positive. When all of the sentiment about the shoes is analyzed, we end up with a profile that is 32% positive, 57% neutral, and only 11% negative. Though I’d like to pull more people out of the neutral zone and put them into the positive zone, that still sounds like success to me.

Those of us who watching the Olympics on television are seeing these flaming hot shoes as blurry yellow dots. You can’t see a logo on the shoe. You can’t see any branding at all. You just see yellow. Clearly, the shoes are making a statement but do consumers know what that statement is, what brand the shoes are?

We ran a second word cloud, one incorporating any mentions of brand names. You can instantly see that consumers do indeed know who made those shoes. There are no mentions of Adidas or Puma or any other brand of shoe. Consumers have done their homework and searched the internet to find out. It’s Nike all the way across the sky. And how do consumers rate Nike on this achievement? Across all of the verbatims where consumers recognize that Nike is the creator, 8% of the verbatims are negative, 52% are neutral, and 40% are positive.

Is Nike regretting not being an official sponsor of the games? I highly doubt it.

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