I totally thought this was going to be a better post but I lost all my steam when I saw that this dude @jeawhiz2 came in and wrote a brief comment and put my whole post to shame…so I’ll post it here because it’s way shorter and sweeter than what I wrote: “Insofar as the brand being the actual product, yes, fakes help the brand. Nike isn't selling you shoes; they're selling you a brand, an attitude, an identity. Consider this from a non-sneaker POV: would you pay a $50 premium for a swoosh branded hoody over a plain unbranded hoody of the same quality? Of course you would. The brand is the product. Fakes would hurt an industry where the object being faked is the product. Like, "fake" dining tables would hurt dining table makers.”
There is a lot of talk in marketing about how a ‘brand’ and a ‘product’ can sometimes be one and the same, and in that case…when a ‘brand’ and a ‘product’ are indecipherable, almost everything ends up helping brands stay ubiquitous. Brands like ‘Xerox’, ‘Kleenex’ have pretty much all become eponymous with an action - meaning it makes no difference what brand copier you’re using if you’re ‘xerox’ing something’ or what brand tissue you using if you ask for a ‘Kleenex’…all of it pretty much helps the original brand.
And so it goes with sneakers…these bootleg and rep manufacturers…I know Nike has special investigators that work with law enforcement, but the teams in charge of this kind of stuff are paltry, to say the least. If Nike is ‘losing’ x amount of money from bootleggers, why wouldn’t they put an equal amount of resources towards squashing said bootleggers?
I think Nike doesn’t do more about fakes because Nike ultimately benefits from having their name and likeness in the street regardless of origination…they’re not collecting every dollar, but they are collecting the eyes and ears that eventually turn into dollars…why squash out bootleggers if it’s keeping their product on the street?