30 THE STITCHING AND THE E-MAIL

Nike iD was set up to allow its customers to personalize their trainers. For a small surcharge, you could choose between a range of colours and select your own lettering, which would duly appear under the famous Nike swoosh.

“If you want it done, build it yourself,” proclaimed the website. It seemed the perfect solution in an era that saw an ever-increasing demand for individuality. Offering customization seemed another way of allowing consumers to “Just do it”. Nike was in effect giving them control over “their” product.

All seemed well until an American student by the name of Johan Perretti asked for the word “Sweatshop” to be stitched into his trainers. It was a clear reference to the very public stories of Nike’s use of cheap child labour in South East Asia.

It seemed like it could be a potential PR disaster, so Nike took swift action. To avoid bad PR, Nike simply refused Johan Perretti’s request, citing his use of “profanity or inappropriate slang”.

They hoped the matter would be closed. It wasn’t. An interchange of emails followed, with Peretti challenging the logic of this decision and Nike refusing to shift.

Finally, Peretti accepted Nike’s right to veto his choice of word, asking only that Nike send him “a colour snapshot of the ten -year-old Vietnamese girl who makes my shoes”.

Unsurprisingly, Peretti never received a response to this final request. Instead, he copied the whole interchange to friends and acquaintances. From there, it was received and forwarded by many thousands of people on the Net, one of whom noted the correspondence went “round the world much further and faster than any of the adverts they paid Michael Jordan more than the entire wage packet of all their sweatshop workers in the world to do”.

And the moral is that social media opens out a world of possibilities – but these aren’t always positive. Have you thought through all the implications of your social media strategy?