The Oklahoma City Thunder got some bad news yesterday. The team’s star player and last season’s NBA Most Valuable Player, Kevin Durant, will be out for six to eight weeks with a stress fracture in his right foot. Outside Oklahoma, the loudest groans and longest sighs are probably coming from Nike headquarters in Portland, Ore. Last month, after some serious flirting with Under Armour (UA), Durant signed a 10-year, $275 million contract with Nike (NKE).
The injury ought to be a small bump in the road for Durant, who is coming off his best season. (His emotional MVP award acceptance speech became an NBA Mother’s Day commercial.) Still, Nike will have to adjust its near-term marketing plans.
In recent years, apparel brands have begun incorporating injuries and their rehabilitation into ad campaigns for major athletes. Adidas (ADS:GR) in particular has tried to make the best of its bad luck. Derrick Rose of the Chicago Bulls suffered a knee injury less than three months after signing a 13-year, $185 million deal with the brand in February 2012. Adidas turned that setback into a “All In For D Rose” ad campaign.
That kept his story—and Rose-related sales—going through a new shoe launch, although maintaining the momentum after Rose lost a second season to another knee injury has proved more difficult.
On the NFL side, Adidas turned a playoff knee injury to their star Washington Redskins quarterback, Robert Griffin III, into the drama of his quest to be ready for the first week of the following season.
Nike and its ad agencies are already masters at making lemonade out of otherwise adverse current events—from the marital infidelity of Tiger Woods …
… to the civic infidelity of LeBron James.
“Obviously, we wish Kevin well in his recovery,” Nike spokesman KeJuan Wilkins says in an e-mail. He declined to discuss the company’s marketing response to the injury, but there’s little doubt that Nike is already at work on a plan. The last message on Nike’s basketball Twitter (TWTR) account before yesterday’s news was a tout for the release of the latest edition of Durant’s signature shoe:
The injury shouldn’t change much for that rollout. Durant’s video testimonial to accompany it already includes some comeback boilerplate. “When you fall and you get back up,” Durant says, “that’s what builds character.”
