Nike roasted over ‘dumb’ marketing gimmick

Nike published a couple of tweets as part of a marketing campaign for retiring basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski that left social media users confused.

The first was a tweet by Nike Basketball’s verified account that says “You can’t spell championship without K.” A second was a video ad tweeted by Nike that showed a string of words: “honor, respect, brotherhood, gold, Cameron, crazies, Durham, family,” which it says “you can’t spell without K.”

After Duke lost to North Carolina in the Final Four of NCAA’s “March Madness,” retiring coach Mike Krzyzewski’s career ended. The tweets were in reference to Mike Krzyzewski, otherwise known as Coach K.

According to former sports writer Jeff Bartl, Nike’s marketing team had about 9 months to plan a Coach K retirement campaign, and it landed on, ‘Let’s do like a bunch of words without a K and be like, ya need a K to spell ‘em and stuff. Get it?!’”

In a tweet, Philadelphia 76ers beat writer Kyle Neubeck noted he can actually spell all these words without K.

Podcaster Sal Iacono, agreed with Neubeck, saying: “The truth is you can spell all these things without K. Turns out Nike is kinda dumb.”

Meanwhile, reporter Daniel Friedman noted that while none of the mentioned words have the letter K, the most hilarious part is that the words ‘basketball’ and ‘Duke” have Ks and were just sitting there for the taking, but Nike decided to go with literally any other word that didn’t have a K.

Friedman added that while sentimentality makes sense, Nike’s execution was poor.

After winning back-to-back national titles in 1993, Duke switched from Adidas to Nike as a sponsor. On the Nike campus in Oregon, there is a fitness center named after Coach K.