JESUS TO JUDAS: The Struggle to Market Lebron James
Transcendent. LeBron James is a transcendent basketball talent. His unique combination of size, athleticism and skills (despite being larger than Karl Malone he plays on the perimeter) present a unique challenge to marketers as they struggle to emphasize his awe-inspiring play while overcoming the prejudice towards his galling competitive advantages.
To make matters worse, LeBron’s peculiarly tone deaf responses to criticism and decision to ‘take his talents to south beach,’ have engendered few allies in his quest to become one of basketball’s beloved icons. Below, we travel through the various schemes Nike’s marketing machine has used to push upon us the Gospel of James.
From the beginning, Nike pushed LeBron as a savior, the chosen one endowed with otherworldly—nee Godly—attributes. His very first commercial featured the Chosen One barging into a church as the Good Reverend Mack extols his virtues. To steal a line from Moderately Cerebral Bias, Nike blatantly borrowed symbology from the black church to, at once, sell sneakers and announce the arrival of basketball’s new God.
Shortly thereafter came the “We Are All Witnesses,” campaign, a much clearer attempted deification of LeBron. The copy, ripped directly from the bible, further brands James as a Basketball Messiah in terms just as blatant as Earl Monroe’s Black Jesus Moniker.
As adapted from Acts 3, which refers to the disciples being witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ:
You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead.
We are witnesses of this.
During the same campaign, Nike used another Bible passage to further correlate James and Jesus.
As adapted from Matthew 7:7-8, in which Jesus encourages his followers that he is a generous God who will provide for them:
Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.
The particular choice of gospel and passage is intriguing for two reasons: “The Gospel According to Matthew,” is popularly regarded as the Gospel that attempted to show Jesus as the messianic fulfillment of Jewish prophecy—in which case LeBron James is the fulfillment of basketball’s greatest prophecy (An Heir to Air); this passage is often misconstrued as a promise of worldly gains as opposed to its deeper meaning of accepting the word of Christ, Nike went with the former.
Following the Witness campaign (and shortly after being banned in China for appropriating their deities as well), Nike took a break with the messianic taglines and gave us Dueling LeBrons and School House Chalk-Throwing (featuring the one man uglier than Sam Cassell).
Then came The Decision. In an hour long spectacle, LeBron managed to alienate sports fans everywhere and saw his Q Score (a metric used to analyze opinions of athletes likeability) drop 77%. In a single moment moment Nike was tasked with marketing Judas as opposed to Jesus. Which gave Rise to…well…”Rise.”
For Nike this is only the beginning. As we’ve seen with Kobe Bryant, negative perception and on-court brilliance can lead to something of a redemption. Interestingly enough, Nike withheld Bryant from Marketing materials for nearly a year after his sexual assault case (with Lebron, the timetable was, obviously, far shorter). Furthermore, Kobe’s marketing has largely been soul-less, casting him as a master of preparation and specimen of technical prowess:
With LeBron, the tactics must be different, for how do you praise a God you do not like?
(Source: Gospel_according_to_james)
