Not every potential environmental improvement is an opportunity for a successful environmental strategy. Success depends on the strategy’s fit with stakeholder demand, channels to capture value from stakeholders, and credibility assurances that the company’s environmental achievements are genuine, as well as its alignment with the company’s overall strategy and strategic resources. The case of Nike’s Considered sustainability initiatives illustrates environmental strategy’s promise and pitfalls. Nike’s Considered Boot was launched to considerable acclaim and received international awards for its advanced sustainability design. The Considered Boot’s rugged look clashed with the sleek styling and performance features that typified the Nike brand and offered few other benefits that enticed consumers. As Nike withdrew the Considered Boot from consumer markets, it leveraged its advanced apparel design expertise to develop more sustainable features for products and to produce tools for measuring products’ sustainability. By making these features and tools public, Nike helped its environmental group stakeholders assess environmental performance throughout the apparel industry. Nike thus aligned its environmental strategy with its nonmarket strategy by allowing environmental groups to pressure competitors to improve their performance to standards Nike had already achieved, thereby raising competitors’ costs.

Faced with budgetary pressures, American universities have embraced propaganda within their athletics programs in order to maintain lucrative partnerships with global corporations. These university administrators become, in effect, educators-as-corporate-propagandists. This chapter examines the controversial relationship between Nike and the University of Oregon. Nike has constructed the University’s brand identity, taken control over its communications and public relations, and spread its habits and impulses to every facet of University operations. But private interests do not always overlap with public or educational ones – even to the point of violating state and federal law. The partnership between Nike and the University of Oregon casts two very different shadows over the question of usefulness of propaganda in a democratic society. On the one hand, its efficacy is unquestionable, especially in the realms of politics, business, activism, and education. On the other hand, propaganda’s utility for democracy is questionable, and in the realm of public education is often incompatible with democratic ends. America’s financially struggling public universities may need to reimagine their use of propaganda. Their success or failure may depend, ironically, on the effects of propaganda elsewhere in society: What use is a university, after all, in a society which has no use for truth?