Nike has lost around $224 billion in market value over five years and is now being ejected from the prestigious S&P 100 index after nearly two decades. At the same time, the sportswear giant is cutting thousands of jobs and losing market share to its competitors.
Nike is not alone. Jaguar Land Rover is to cut around 4,000 jobs following declining sales, while the Jaguar brand attempts to recover after a widely criticised ‘woke’ relaunch featuring no cars, but androgynous models, pink sets and the slogan ‘Delete Ordinary’.
Two of the world’s most famous brands chose to distance themselves from their traditional image and customer base. Now the bill is coming due.
Nike has lost $224 billion
Nike shares reached their lowest level in twelve years in September. The company’s market value has fallen from around $281 billion at its peak in 2021 to approximately $57 billion – a loss of nearly 80 per cent.
The decline has prompted S&P Dow Jones Indices to remove Nike from the S&P 100, the index comprising some of the largest and most established companies in the United States. Nike has been included since 2008.
The company remains in the broader S&P 500 index, but its ejection from the S&P 100 is a powerful symbolic defeat for a brand that for decades was regarded as virtually unassailable.
At the same time, Nike has announced that around 1,400 employees are to go globally. This follows the company’s announcement in January of 775 redundancies at US distribution centres. In 2024, a further 1,600 job cuts were decided upon.
The problems are evident not only on the stock market and in the staffing figures. Nike’s share of the global sports footwear market fell from 25.9 per cent in 2022 to 22.9 per cent in 2025, according to market data cited by Reuters. Competitors such as Adidas, New Balance, Hoka, On and Asics have run off with the customers. For the time being, Nike has had to watch them from behind.
Man in sports bra proved no sales success
In April 2023, Nike entered into a partnership with the transgender-identifying influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Mulvaney, who is biologically male, posed in a sports bra and leggings from the company’s women’s collection. The campaign triggered calls for a boycott and fierce criticism, including from former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies.
Mulvaney had already been used to advertise Bud Light, America’s most mainstream and, at the time, best-selling beer brand. There, too, customers responded with their wallets. Bud Light sales fell by 24.6 per cent year-on-year during the four-week period ending 3 June 2023. The brand lost the top spot in the US beer market to Modelo Especial after more than two decades at the top, according to NielsenIQ figures cited by Reuters.
The boycott became so extensive that being ‘Bud Light-ed’ is now used as an expression for what happens when a brand alienates its own customers through politicised marketing.
Nike thus had a recent and exceptionally costly warning sign in front of it, but chose the same influencer to sell sports bras to women. When the company later announced further job cuts, sympathy on social media was limited.
– If they fire everyone, at least it’s inclusive, one commentator wrote.
Podcaster Benny Johnson summed up the matter as follows:
– They paid a biological man to advertise women’s sportswear. It was a mockery and betrayal of customers, driven by blind allegiance to woke ideology. There is no market for this, and now they are finding that out the hard way.
Chief Executive Elliott Hill is now attempting to return Nike to its core business: running, football and the development of new sports shoes. It is about as remarkable as Jaguar taking an interest in cars again.
Jaguar wanted to ‘delete the ordinary’
At Jaguar, the upheaval has been even more dramatic. In the autumn of 2024, the British car marque launched a new identity under the slogans ‘Copy Nothing’ and ‘Delete Ordinary’. The traditional jaguar disappeared from the logo, while the launch film featured colourfully dressed models – but no cars.
The campaign was met with fierce criticism. Elon Musk dryly asked whether Jaguar still sold cars. The answer would soon become rather complicated. Jaguar had decided to end production of its existing models before the marque was to be relaunched as an all-electric luxury manufacturer. In April 2025, therefore, only 49 new Jaguar cars were registered in Europe, compared with 1,961 in the same month the previous year. This represented a decline of 97.5 per cent. The extreme collapse in sales therefore cannot be explained by a consumer boycott alone. Jaguar had in practice removed the old cars from the market before their replacements were ready. That was planned – although it is not certain that this makes the strategy any more reassuring.
Jaguar chief executive Rawdon Glover did not respond to the criticism with any apology. In an interview with the Financial Times in 2024, he described some of the reactions as ‘vile hatred and intolerance’ – motbydelig hat og intoleranse – and claimed that the campaign’s message had been lost in a ‘blaze of intolerance’. Jaguar needed to move away from the car industry’s traditional stereotypes, he argued.
Jaguar’s management also made no secret of the fact that the old customers could quite happily disappear. The company estimated that only 15 per cent of buyers of the new electric models would come from Jaguar’s existing customer base. Fully 85 per cent would have to be replaced by new customers.
‘That’s perfectly fine. Jaguar doesn’t need to be for everybody,’ said Rawdon Glover.
Management had thus accepted in advance that it would lose almost its entire traditional customer base. That was in March 2025. Shortly afterwards, the sales figures showed that the customers had understood the message. Whatever the plan may have been, it is part of the story that chief executive Adrian Mardell announced his departure that same summer, after three years as chief executive and 35 years with the company.
JLR’s total retail sales fell to 352,300 vehicles in the 2026 financial year, a decline of 17.8 per cent. Wholesale sales fell by 23.2 per cent. Jaguar Land Rover, which also controls Range Rover, Defender and Discovery, is now to cut around 4,000 jobs over two years. That amounts to nearly ten per cent of the company’s global workforce. The company aims to save £1.7 billion.
Customers got identity politics – competitors got the customers
Nike and Jaguar operate in different markets, and their declines have complex causes. Nevertheless, the companies have made some strikingly similar choices: Both turned their backs on their traditional image and established customer base. Nike prioritised identity-political signalling while innovation stagnated. Jaguar removed both the predator and the cars from its advertising, before the company in practice removed the cars from the market. The result is declining market shares, collapsing stock-market value and thousands of employees losing their jobs. Management can point to China, tariffs, product plans and reorganisations. The customers have nevertheless drawn their own conclusion.
‘Go woke, go broke’ was not invented by a consultancy firm. It was revealed at the checkout.
