Yeesh….
Yikes on several bikes for the things we talk about in today’s episode!
This month, we are plugging the American Red Cross! Even if you can’t give blood, there are many other ways to help out. Visit https://www.redcross.org/ to find out how!
SOURCES
A Dying Brand: Why Converse Is Playing in Black People’s Faces
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macklemore%E2%80%93Ed_Sheeran_tour_controversy
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/starbucks-korea-tank-day-controversy-1798963
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-20/converse-ceo-pledges-review-over-ad-that-critics-say-evoked-kkk (Archive: https://archive.ph/ZaVc9)
https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/from-converse-to-ed-sheeran-lets-end-these-tedious-apology-tours/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/09/21/nike-shares-edge-lower-after-converse-ad-controversy-mbapp-exit/
https://abcnews.com/Business/converse-pulls-controversial-ad-apologizes-backlash-alleged-kkk/story?id=136621195
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
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TRANSCRIPT:
About two and a half weeks ago, the shoe brand Converse, which is now owned by Nike, put up an ad featuring a K-pop artist named Karina, the singer from the group aespa. The campaign is called “Stars Align with Karina.”
In the ad, Karina is wearing a white dress, holding a pair of the iconic Chuck Taylor canvas shoes, and standing inside a projected white star. But her face isn’t shown, her arm is almost a silhouette and only one point of the star is shown on her white dress.
Unfortunately, what a lot of people saw was a white pointy hood next to what appeared to be the feet of someone dangling as if they’d been hanged. And as the image went viral on social media as celebrities such as Yvette Nicole Brown commented on it, it was sort of like that meme from many years ago about what color the dress was, but this time, it was, “do you see why people of color might be offended by this flagrant use of white supremacist iconography?”
I know I gasped when I saw the picture, and my production assistant Holly said she did too. We both saw it immediately without being told what to look for. I showed the picture to a few other people and was surprised that it wasn’t as obvious to them as it was to me. But as soon as I said, “what if I told you it looked like her arm is someone’s leg and they’ve been hanged?”, they immediately saw what I meant.
Now, look, this isn’t virtue signaling. We’re not trying to get a gold star here for spotting imagery that, intentionally or not, evokes the dark history of racism in the United States. In fact, I don’t think Converse or its parent company Nike saw this ad as being problematic at all.
And that’s the problem we’re going to discuss today. Because, why didn’t they? And why did they make it worse by running another ad from a different agency also showing Converse shoes being hung from a tree – yet another concept that evokes trauma and racism?
Because I’m going to argue the actual problem is that they didn’t show these ads to anyone who might have noticed those things.
And that’s a lesson we all need to take seriously in an era where diversity, equity and inclusion have been under attack.
Because DEI probably would have saved Converse and Nike both from a really embarrassing – and costly – mistake.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Let’s back up for a minute and say that the last few weeks have taught us a lot about what happens when you offend people without realizing that you’ve offended them.
The apology tours that have been happening are interesting to watch from the sidelines, but absolutely painful to those impacted.
The Oxford United Football Club in England, which was founded in 1893, decided to launch American-style jerseys that said “UNITED” on the back and “93” below it. The problem, of course, was the timing. The shirts went live on September 11, 2026 – the 25th anniversary of that US tragedy, when the flight United 93 was one of the planes hijacked.
Within about two hours, the shirts were removed from sale, the promotional details were taken down, and it seems to have all been a really terrible coincidence and not an intentional cry for attention through stunt marketing, as some suggested.
For the next week, though, this football club was dragged in American media and turned into a whipping boy for insensitivity in product marketing. They had to issue an apology and assure the public they had not meant to offend anyone. They also had to take responsibility for the fact that someone, somewhere in their organization should have noticed.
Earlier this year, a similar situation happened in South Korea with their licensed Starbucks Korea brand. I’ve covered this before, but to recap, the basic issue was that Starbucks Korea was launching a cup they called a “tank” and they announced “Tank Day” would be May 18, which just so happened to be the 46th anniversary of the Gwangju massacre, a really terrible event in South Korean history where the government’s military forces violently murdered dissidents.
To make matters worse, the campaign also used a line that said “Thwack it on the desk,” a little too close to a famous police justification for murdering a student activist in 1987 where they claimed they “merely hit the desk with a thwack.” This doesn’t mean much to those of us outside the culture, but in South Korea, it’s as offensive as selling a jersey named after a hijacked 9/11 flight.
The Starbucks Korea marketing team claimed they’d gotten the ideas from conversations with a chatbot – definitely not a good excuse. And somehow, no one understood that these messages might provoke a fury among the general public.
And a fury it did provoke. In fact, it led to public protests in South Korea and a major problem for the company. The billionaire chairman of the organization had to apologize publicly both in print and in person. Even now, Starbucks Korea is suffering from a loss of customers and public trust.
The reason I bring up these examples is because they’re all three more of less analogous to the situation Converse is facing. A brand or personality accidentally does something that offends the public, is blindsided by the negative reaction and then has to step back, try to understand what’s happening and issue an appropriate enough apology to appease the masses.
Unfortunately, in the age of social media and 24 hour news cycles, these sorts of events tend to burn brightly and attract a lot of attention. While we might argue that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, the stock market certainly disagrees – Nike’s shares opened up this week trading lower, and as I’ve discussed in previous episodes, Nike is already struggling after 5 years of failing to meet expectations due to a weakening shoe and athleisure market.
We could spend the rest of this episode talking about the right way to make a public apology and the PR playbook involved in turning things around by demonstrating that you’re listening and learning as a brand, but honestly, by that point, the damage is done.
When a story spins out of control, it’s like a forest fire that has to exhaust its fuel so it can burn itself out. The damage that can be done during the most intense periods of the raging fire can be severe and long-lasting, and the evidence will be around long after the fire’s over.
There is no good solution to dealing with a media crisis where you’ve offended people because they’re already going to be suspicious of your intentions and angry that you upset them by being so careless and thoughtless with your message.
The better solution is not to let this sort of thing happen in the first place.
And you do that by having a well-structured process for internal and external review.
For advertising, it’s really important to have a diverse internal audience that can look at what’s being developed and to offer insights into how it might be perceived. This audience also needs to be taken seriously and not treated as wet blankets or naysayers. Their insights should guide the brand to be its best and should protect it from harm.
Having an internal audience like this is your first and best line of defense. I’m certain that if Converse had put this ad in front of a diverse group of people from different age cohorts, ethnic groups and backgrounds, somebody would have noticed the problem and suggested that these ads were unintentionally evoking racist imagery and were reminiscent of violence against black people in the United States.
Just a quick note – nooses, shoes hanging from trees and pointy white hoods are all things that are pretty likely to be interpreted as racist because these are iconography of white supremacy in the United States.
And this isn’t hard. We know some symbols are taboo regardless of our intent. For example, most people would never knowingly put a swastika in a brand campaign, even if they meant to evoke the traditional religious symbol that’s been around for thousands of years, because it is today so strongly associated with the Nazi movement.
Likewise, most brands will no longer utilize the Confederate Battle Flag in any capacity because it’s so strongly associated with racial violence and white supremacist groups. It wasn’t always this way – back when The Dukes of Hazzard was on TV or in the movie theaters, the Rebel Flag was associated with the Duke boys’ car, the General Lee.
But you see the problem, right? Even in that show and those movies, it was a symbol for a sort of reckless lawlessness that the so-called good old boys meaning no harm could get away with in the South if they display symbols associated with a problematic history of white people fighting to preserve black slavery.
Now, look – I realize talking about all of this is uncomfortable and divisive.
And yet that’s exactly why we need to talk about it, because Converse wasn’t willing to have an internal audience who could have those discussions, and now they’re paying a price for it. By focusing on the superficial details about this being a campaign featuring Asian people who do not have a history of white on black racism and violence, they missed the iconography they were evoking because nobody was willing or able to speak up.
This happens all the time in developing brand campaigns. A photo or image or video will seem perfectly fine until someone catches something that might not be the best look for the brand, whether it’s an unintended gesture or expression from a model or an unflattering depiction of the product or even a shadow that creates a confusing addition to the image. It’s pointed out, debated and usually dropped.
But let’s say your internal audience misses an offensive or repulsive quality of an ad or message. Shouldn’t you have a second line of defense? I’d suggest you not only should, but that it should be required that you put any external messaging or imagery in front of a research panel made up of a diverse global audience and gauge what public reaction might be.
Ask the research panelists to indicate what concerns they have about the content and really listen to what they have to say. You’re not obligated to follow through on their suggestions, but you should at least keep your eyes and ears open for reasons to pull the campaign back and re-assess it before you launch.
I’m certain if Converse had heard from a smattering of people in their research panel that their image could be mistaken for racist imagery, they would have at the very least re-evaluated why some folks were seeing that.
Underneath all of this, though, should be a brand strategy that articulates very precise values and strict guidelines for imagery.
Two I’d recommend they have in place going forward – the star that’s part of the brand logo is never shown in a distorted or incomplete manner that might be mistaken for another symbol, and shoes are either shown obviously empty or recognizably connected to a very obviously unharmed leg. They’re never hanging or tied to anything.
I’m going to guess that Converse did have something like this in place but decided to be creative in their attempts to appeal to global markets and overlooked some of their own guidelines.
They’ve been advertising shoes for decades without any controversy at all, and those boring old brand guidelines are probably why.
And yet by probably deviating from them to go for a more creative aesthetic, Converse has created a situation where they’ve marginalized some of their customer base and tarnished their brand.
So, what does Converse do from here? When their fire’s done raging and they get a chance to do an internal review on how they can keep this from happening again, I hope their solution is to implement a diverse internal and external audience for reviewing future creative concepts. Their mantra should be “never again.”
Converse also needs to take better care with how they apologize. Their initial apology didn’t go out through social channels where offended customers are paying attention – it went out through business publications via news release to reporters covering the story. They clearly hoped that the anger would subside, but they didn’t address the issue head on with the people to whom it mattered.
They need to do better in the future.
But beyond that, they can earn some goodwill by showing support for the black community, promoting more black people to prominent roles within their organization and perhaps working with black-owned creative agencies to develop their next campaigns.
I highly doubt they’ll do any of that, but it would be a smart move if they did. They would not only show that they really did learn a lesson from all of this, but also show they’re committed to progress and inclusion by transforming their internal culture to ensure that in the future, they’re setting themselves up for success, not for another round of costly mistakes.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been the Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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