Picture the situation. You’re a huge brand with a dominant position in your market. You have enough power and money to make King Solomon blush, but you have a couple of problems. Firstly, by virtue of your size, people think you’re a bit faceless. Secondly, you’ve been the subject of some damaging investigations that have linked your products to exploitative labour in the developing world.

So you make money, but oridinary people hate you. What do you do?

What Nike’s done. That’s what.

Nike started the 21st century as a corporate social responsibility whipping boy. Na0mi Klein’s demolition of its brand in No Logo transformed its public image from being a world-leading manufacturer of posh trainers into the kind of villainous organisation that, had it been around in 1830s London, would have been pushing small children up chimneys armed with toothbrushes.

To its credit, however, Nike has slowly and carefully repaired a lot of its damage to its brand. And not by the kind of defensive top down activity that huge global companies default to, but by initatives designed to build a strong, positive relationship with the people who consume most of its products. Runners.

Nike’s marketing over the past few years has been a textbook example of how to do ‘relationship marketing’. After working out that runners liked listening to their iPods as they ran it teamed up with Apple to develop the hugely successful Nike+.  It picked runner-friendly celebrities for its charity tie-ins, it blogged and offered exclusive content on Facebook. Basically everything you should do to get a constituency of hobbyists who could act as your brand ambassadors on side.

Now this strategy has taken an interesting turn with the Nike Grid campaign. This is a street-running competition devised by Nike that people join via Facebook (through Facebook Connect) and which encourages them to race each other through the streets of London, using the capital’s under-used network of phone boxes as staging points. The more phone boxes you connect, the more points you score. It’s a cute idea, and one that indrectly associates Nike with ‘reclaim the streets’ activism – a subtle kind of activism that puts Nike on the same level as the (running) man in the street.

It’s not something you’ll care about if you’re not a runner, but that’s exactly the point. Nike has done very well out of cultivating niche markets, and this is a brilliant example of how a brand can harness the various tactical methods of keeping in touch with people in today’s connected world, and turn them into an elegant integrated campaign. It makes you feel part of a community, but also reminds you that you need a new pair of running shoes…