Social Responsibility paper

An odd couple was featured in the 1992 edition of Harpers Magazine. One was a sports phenomenon called Michael Jordan. The other was a young Indonesian worker called Sadisah.

Sadisah, the article revealed, earned 14 cents an hour making Nike running shoes. After working six days a week, 10 hours a day for a month, he earned enough money to buy a single Nike shoe at its US retail price. The article also claimed that Sadisah would have to work for more than 44,000 years to earn as much as Jordan had recouped from his Nike endorsement deal.

The darkest chapter in Nike's history and a new era in brand management had begun. Over the next five years Nike experienced a remarkable public backlash. Critical reports appeared in publications as diverse as The Economist and Rolling Stone and charities such as Oxfam and Christian Aid joined in.

Around the world, the opening of Nike Town retail stores were turned into tense, often violent, standoffs between local police and protesters. On US university campuses, students protested against Nike's links with slave labor working conditions and forced their sports teams to sever lucrative sponsorship deals with the now infamous sportswear brand. The internet was ablaze with anti-Nike sites, many featuring cleverly altered versions of Nike's identity such as the 'Swooshtika' and slogans such as 'Nike: Just Don't'. As then-chief executive Phil Knight observed in 1998, the brand had become 'synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse'.

For decades, Nike had tendered almost all of its production to factories in developing markets, but so had almost every other big clothing company. Why was Nike so heavily criticised?

The answer was its brand. Nike was the clear market leader and the company with the highest levels of global brand awareness. It also had an influential and ...