Sport and the American Dream

Lifestyle branding, according to the documentary, is when the brand does not only promote their product but is inspired to seek the lifestyle of people. As an example, brands that we see today like Nike, Coca Cola, and Tommy Hilfiger, are marketing lifestyle and focused on promoting their brand by motivating people with desirable lifestyles instead of just focusing on promoting their product. Before this way of marketing by corporates, brands like Quakers would promote their product with these cartoon people and promote their products directly showing their consumers that they are a relatable company just like the local stores, but now it has shifted to branding lifestyles.

Nike is a company that has started promoting lifestyle by showing how they are a sports company that represents the American dream, using athletes like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods in advertisements.

Another company like Virgin is a brand that shows that they are selling the idea and lifestyle instead of their product. The main shift from the past is that they are now marketing an idea and meaning while in the past they were focused on marketing their commodities or product. Nike paradigm is when brands like Nike buys shoes from factories that can make the shoes that they designed as cheap as possible, and the factories would get subcontracts and subcontracts making a maze of contracts, to produce the product at the minimum. But because they do need to maintain a decent quality of their product, they tend to save money of laboring, finding the cheapest labor they can. They would find places that have no minimum wages and have contracts that do not take responsibility for the employee’s safety or health.

Almost 80 percent of the workers are women ages going from 18 to 25. According to the documentary, a worker said that the company may have set up the workers like this because women are easier to control than men, especially younger women who are far away from their family are more easier for the companies to control. They try to invest on their product at the minimum and brand their logo and idea with big meanings selling their ideology to the consumers. While Nike had a contract with Japan, when their wages increased they reached out to other Asian countries like Korea and Taiwan, which these countries also had their wages increased. Then Nike and Reebok looked for other.

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