Absurd resale prices, professional scalpers, price manipulation hoarding, and raffle hacker bots have become the general impression of China’s sneaker scene, resulting in disillusioned sneaker fans and undermining sneaker culture at large; with even news agencies publicly condemning it as a “deformed cultural trend”.

For SNKRS App’s 2nd anniversary, Nike decided to leverage its influence to To reclaim the spotlight from the opportunistic social behavior and shine it back onto the purest love for sneakers.

As the whole of China anticipated the next hype sneaker on the SNKRS app, we dropped a bigger surprise: a couch that invited influencers and fans alike to take a seat on this sneaker sanctuary, online and offline, to share their personal stories behind the sneakers they are most passionate about.

Our target audience are the true fans of the sneaker community who are passionate about everything sneakers. They see sneaker culture as part of their lifestyle and appreciate the design and stories behind each and every pair of sneakers.

The SNKRS app has a high daily-usage frequency amongst our target audience but lacks a community discussion function, therefore we first launch our key content series on the SNKRS app before driving our fans to Weibo to further engage under our campaign hashtag.

Our approach to restore the lost pride and respect within the sneaker community was to leverage our brand influence and create a highly visible platform, in the form of a couch, that speaks for the heart and soul of sneaker culture. By gathering fans to collectively express their true passion on our platform, we will become the loudest and most exciting voice in in the sneaker scene.

Throughout three weeks, we partnered with six of the most well-known independent sneaker stores located in five cities in China and placed our couches inside them. We then invited local sneaker influencers onto the couches to create a "SNKRS Talk" content series that covered sneaker culture-related subjects under the themes of Legacy, Creativity, and Collaboration.

Meanwhile, on our own social media, we dropped a virtual couch with an infinite number of seats for fans who couldn’t get to a physical one and invited everyone to jump on and participate in an organic dialogue around sneaker culture. Sneaker lovers could share their unique stories under our campaign hashtag either on the official SNKRS channel or through their local sneaker store social channels. By activating fans online and offline, our SNKRS Couch brought renewed excitement and chatter within the community all over China and allowed fans to express their deepest passions.

On the SNKRS App, the “SNKRS Talk” content series hit 2.8M views within the first 48 hours, and an average 21% of active users viewed and engaged within our content threads.

Over 2,600 sneaker lovers checked in at our 6 physical couch locations to share their one-of-a-kind sneaker stories. Across our partner sneaker stores’ social platforms, we earned an additional 3.7M impressions.

Our campaign hashtag achieved 190M impressions across our social media channels, collected 124K user-generated posts on Weibo, translating to a media value of around 5.7M CNY with zero media spend.

At its peak, our campaign hashtag was featured in Weibo's list of top 20 most searched keywords. Since then, new sneaker stories are shared under our hashtag even till today.