American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Although representations of Native Americans have frequently been used in advertising, historically Natives themselves have been ignored as a consumer market. This paper evaluates the Nike N7 Twitter campaign, which uses Native athletes and imagery to market to Natives, in the context of theory on marketing to ethnic minorities. Specifically, it explores whether the campaign is successfully reaching Native consumers, a historically difficult market to reach, whether advertisements must be granularly targeted to specific tribal cultures, and whether embedded ethnic cues within promotional images on the N7 account affect Twitter users' engagement with the post.