Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Let’s say you are some multinational shoe boss guy in charge of athletic shoes and apparel, and you’re looking to exand into some a new market. Maybe you saw Garden State or your daughter just started spending half her waking hours reading blogs, and so you decide that this new “indie rock” market is what you wanna go after. If no one fills you in on the fact that the type of kids that get into that kind of indie rock stuff generally hate exercise, are afraid of the idea of sports, and would nine times out of ten rather buy some sort of casual sneaker that shows their appreciation for hip-hop culture than a high-performance athletic shoe, this might seem like a stroke of genius. Nike and Adidas have both stumbled somehow onto this idea at about the same time, but have taken two approaches to selling a product to a specific market based on their music.
