#airmaxday2019: Identity and Engagement With Air Max Day 2019 on Twitter

Nike’s invented holiday, Air Max Day, is celebrated annually on March 26th by sneaker enthusiasts worldwide. Participation in this event occurs predominantly across social media platforms. This pilot study analyzes how Nike’s Air Max consumers engage with this holiday and with other sneaker fans across Twitter on Air Max Day 2019. This will be discerned by studying the images, captions and replies of the top fifty tweets posted to the #AirMaxDay2019 hashtag on March 26th, 2019 using Schreiber’s (2017) praxeological approach. By studying the themes and patterns present in these elements, this study seeks to better understand the content posted to #AirMaxDay2019 and users’ motivations for posting it. For the purpose of this research paper, a “fandom” is defined as a distinct community of devotees, and this concept will be explored using John Fiske’s 1992 work entitled “The Cultural Economy of Fandom” to discern examples of fan productivity, a term referring to the ways in which fans perform or express a social identity based on their object of fandom.