How to Master the Art of ‘Trash Talk’ Marketing

The trash talk being thrown around during the NBA Finals isn’t just coming from the players but directly from the marketing departments of the sportswear brands that sponsor them.

Minutes after the Oklahoma City Thunder eliminated the Minnesota Timberwolves from the playoffs last week, Converse came out with a video on Instagram depicting an ant seemingly being crushed by the Converse SHAI 001. Even casual basketball fans would recognise the diss: Timberwolves’ star shooting guard – and Adidas athlete – Anthony Edwards’ nickname is Ant-Man, while the SHAI 001 is the first signature sneaker by Thunder point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The post’s caption read “Not hard 2 believe. @shai is headed to the Finals.” This too was a play on Edwards’ “Believe that” Adidas campaigns, itself a trash talk masterpiece, including one ad where he tosses out pairs of rival signature basketball shoes to spotlight his own signature Adidas style.

“It was really sharp, not heavy-handed, but a subtle nod [for Converse] to say ‘Hey, we see you, we beat you, and we’re moving on,’” said Derick Beresford, a sports marketing consultant who previously worked for the Brooklyn Nets and the consumer agency Team Epiphany, who added that the ad has helped Converse Basketball break out in a way it hasn’t since the Dwyane Wade era in the 2000s.

Trash talk is routine in the cutthroat worlds of soda and wireless carriers, but with a few notable exceptions is pretty rare in fashion. While notable fashion rivalries have surfaced between designers such as Guram and Demna Gvasalia, it’s usually been reserved as a war of words since it’s typically not chic to bring beef to the runway or glossy ad campaigns.

Yet Converse isn’t the only brand embracing the energy that comes with talking smack about your competitors. In May, Kiehl’s teased that it would become the skincare amenity partner for the luxury New York City gym Life Time with shady posts that nodded to its viral breakup with Equinox last year. In October, the Australian drug store chain Chemist Warehouse recreated a Charlotte Tilbury ad that itself dissed beauty dupes to promote its lower-priced beauty products. Also last year, the cashmere label Naadam unfurled an Instagram campaign that took shots at its rival Quince. Within streetwear, Tremaine Emory’s label Denim Tears released a collaborative capsule collection with artist Arthur Jafa in 2024 that addressed Emory’s departure as the creative director of Supreme by flipping one of Supreme’s iconic brand motifs into a slogan that commented on systemic racism.

All these moments arrive with trash talk becoming a larger part of our cultural climate, so much that Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” diss record towards Drake topped Billboard charts and picked up five Grammy awards in February. Consumers are paying attention and are invested in the narratives created by talking smack.

“We’re likely experiencing a rise in trash talk within product marketing because it’s become more of an accepted form of public discourse,” said Rafi Kohan, a sports journalist who authored the book Trash Talk that explores the psychology and history behind bad-mouthing.

Kohan traces trash talk back to biblical times—yes, the Prophet Isaiah penned what was essentially a diss record to the King of Babylon. But it plays especially well in the modern attention economy. Trash talk grabs eyeballs and creates an “us versus them” narrative that calls upon a brand’s audience to pick a side and defend it. So for brands, digging into a competitor can create a marketing moment that fosters a strong sense of customer loyalty and community while also establishing a narrative that positions them as the ones up top.

Seizing the Narrative

That’s what the emerging Baltimore-based skate label Carpet Company aimed for when it trash-talked a streetwear competitor named Mertra this year for allegedly copying the brand’s viral Instagram video campaign for a heat-reactive jacket Carpet released in 2024. Carpet co-founder Ayman Abdeldayem says that when his customers first tagged the brand in the comments of Mertra’s strikingly similar Instagram post in November (which was posted nearly 10 months after Carpet’s) he laughed it off.

But upon seeing Mertra’s post go more viral than Carpet’s, leading Mertra to gain thousands of followers, and then noticing the brand delete comments on the post that credited Carpet for the concept, Abdeldayem decided to fire back when his label released another iteration of a heat-reactive jacket in January by copying Mertra’s campaign.

“We have very loyal customers but it didn’t boost sales in any way. We more so used it as an opportunity to tell our side of the story without really having to explain it,” said Abdeldayem. “People still go on that video, and comment, ‘You copied Mertra’ until they read the comments and then say ‘My bad, I see that they copied you.’”

Beresford adds that with social media being a dominant form of communication, it’s important to understand that the audience trash talk marketing speaks to can be pieced together no matter how subliminal the message is. Both Carpet and Converse didn’t tag or directly mention the brands they were targeting in their trash-talking adverts. Yet the message was still clear enough for those in the know.

“People are just more heightened to the awareness of it, and are seeing it play out,” said Beresford.

When to Step Back

While trash-talking can lead to virality and turn into clickbait headlines or content creator fodder, there is a line. Kohan said there aren’t hard and fast rules for when trash talk goes too far, but when it works, it’s usually promoting competition and pushing an opponent to perform better, rather than just tearing them down.

Carpet’s Abdeldayem said he’s never one to start beef despite how his situation with Mertra unfolded. It wasn’t the first time he felt his brand had been copied. However, in other instances, he took it more as a compliment and felt it wasn’t worth engaging. Especially if it was done by brands he grew up on and admired.

“If I were to clap back towards something giant, someone I had a good relationship with, I would make a more solid judgment and not respond to it openly in public,” said Abdeldayem.

Granted that a viral trash-talking campaign could potentially lead to a boost in revenue—Glossy reported that sales for Naadam increased by 47 percent during the week it took shots at Quince—brands need to know what their place is in the market and what’s authentic to them before talking trash, Beresford said. He noted that Skechers could easily have gone the Converse route with Knicks forward OG Anunoby, who landed memorable moments this NBA season after signing with the brand in February. But that sort of marketing isn’t in Skechers’ DNA.

Timing is everything. Last week, Puma released T-shirts that played off the internet peanut gallery labeling Indiana Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton as “overrated.” Beresford said while the concept was good, the execution failed to land a strong punch since it was released before the Pacers won the game that advanced them to the NBA Finals and arrived nearly a day after their last winning playoffs game.

“This game is all about being timely and you got to hit it when that conversation happens, when the moment is hot, because then you carry the conversation,” said Beresford.