Hero Mode Activated
Inside Nike’s x Snapchat Paris 2024 Summer Olympics campaign, the HARBE model, and how Gameful Intelligence reshapes loyalty in the AI era.
I was standing near the Arc de Triumph when I saw it happen — a moment so small it could've been missed entirely, and yet it captured the whole point.
A 14-year-old boy looked up from his phone, eyes wide. He had just scored. Not in a game as we once knew it, but inside a layer of augmented reality engineered by Nike. Two girls beside him scanned a floating Nike icon hovering over the monument. One whispered, "Let's find the next one." The other raised her phone, captured the scene, and tagged it: #MyVictoryMode.
They weren't influencers. They weren't even traditional customers. But in that moment, they were athletes, explorers, and players — part of a narrative Nike had written not just around them but with them. No purchases were made, but something of far greater value was exchanged. They left with a memory, an emotion, and a new idea of who they could be — and who Nike helped them become.
That is no longer advertising. It's something closer to authorship. It's where augmented reality intersects with identity, loyalty, and the redefinition of what it means to belong — not just to a brand but to a story.
I Saw the Future of Loyalty on a Sidewalk in Paris
Paris, in the summer of 2024, was an unlikely arena. The Olympic Games had returned, but the city hadn't changed its rules. Just nine percent of Paris is available for play. No courts. There are few open areas. There is very little infrastructure that invites young people to gather, move, or compete.
Where most brands would have seen limitations, Nike saw an opportunity for transformation. Not through a product launch but through a narrative system: an extended reality campaign called Victory Mode. Using Snapchat AR Lenses and live events, Nike turned the city itself into a playable field. Monuments became mission points. Streets became scoreboards. Teens became performers in a town that had historically excluded them from its design.
And the results weren't just metrics. They were memories, authored in real-time, and co-owned by the users who played through them. That's where the new game is being played — not on screens or in stores, but in emotional space. In how we design identity, how we provoke action, and how we build meaning in an age defined by synthetic Intelligence and disappearing friction.
What AR Can Do (When You Let People Lead)
To understand what Nike accomplished — and what is now available to every strategist, creator, or product leader seriously thinking about immersive experiences — we need a model that tracks not only usage but also emotional depth. That model is HARBE: Holistic Augmented Reality Brand Equity.
The HARBE Model, introduced in 2025 by Lambrecht, Baumgarth, and Henseler1, builds upon Keller's foundational brand equity pyramid with a critical update. It adds what traditional brand frameworks have long overlooked: the user's lived emotional reality inside the experience. It captures the transition from awareness to relation by asking not what the brand said but what the user felt — in the moment, through the medium, and afterward in memory.
The model hinges on perception and evaluation. Not impressions, not dwell time — but how an experience is perceived emotionally and how it is judged in context. When perception and evaluation align, something changes. The user doesn't just see the brand — they connect with it, attach to it, and even defend it.
That's what happened in Paris. The campaign shifted Nike's role from product to enabler. The interface wasn't an app. It was a portal. Teens navigated citywide quests, discovered hidden challenges, scanned floating artifacts, and received live performance feedback. The streets spoke to them. The monuments played with them. The brand listened and responded. That's not storytelling. That's story building — with the user cast as the protagonist.
And here's what matters most: it worked not because the technology was flashy but because the experience was human. It was felt. The mechanics were simple: wayfinding overlays, gamified leaderboards, and city-based challenges. But the emotional stack was complex. Through HARBE's lens, you can see how Nike activated all four layers of brand equity: from salience to meaning, response to relation.
Yet HARBE alone doesn't tell us how to create these systems. It gives us a diagnostic. What's needed is a creative compass — something that guides the crafting of emotional equity from the inside out. That's where Gameful Intelligence comes in.
Gameful Intelligence is not gamification. It doesn't ask you to add points to a product or call your users "players." It asks something deeper: What would change if you designed for human agency, not user engagement? What becomes possible when you position the individual not as a recipient of your brand story but as its co-author?
In Paris, Nike operationalized five components from the GI model — and it's these that turned a technical activation into a narrative transformation.
The first was the Agency. Players were free to decide where to go, how to compete, and what to unlock. These weren't linear missions. They were open systems of navigation, rewarding personal choice, and ownership of the journey. The second was Being — not abstractly, but through Augmented Identities. Teens who had no sanctioned space to play found themselves layered into a new role: urban athletes, real-time competitors, and explorers of a city now responsive to them.
Most critically, Nike handed over the Hero's role, not to their own brand mascot or marketing spokesperson, but to the user. The leaderboard didn't gamify their behavior. It mythologized it. Every step, every scan, and every point scored reinforced the story: You are the main character here.
The campaign also invited creative expression. Though not a multiplayer game, it became socially performative. Teens captured selfies mid-quest, shared their scores, and celebrated their routes. They posted, tagged, boasted, and remembered. Their city became a co-authored highlight reel — not of consumption, but of play.
Finally, and perhaps most strategically, Nike embedded the concept of Juloot — the convergence of play and loot. Except here, the loot wasn't a discount code or digital token. It was emotional capital. It was recognition, elevation, and the sense that performance in a designed space could lead to status in the real one.
In the AI era, where personalization is instantaneous and attention is fragmented, it's easy to mistake speed for strategy. But what Victory Mode teaches us is the opposite. Loyalty isn't earned through velocity. It's earned through designed pause — through moments that create meaning, provoke reflection, and reward identity construction.
That is why the return on engagement now surpasses the return on investment. ROE is measured in actions taken without a script, paths followed without reward, and time spent inside an experience that feels authored rather than prescribed. It's the trust signal of the AI age. It tells us not just that users showed up but that they changed in the process.
So the question becomes: How are we designing that change?
What system, framework, or lens are we using to ask the only question that matters now — not "did the feature work," but "did the story land?"
You Don't Win Loyalty. You Build It
HARBE gives us the emotional pyramid. Gameful Intelligence gives us the mechanics of elevation. Together, they offer something strategy has long lacked: a way to build systems of emotional equity at scale without losing soul, intention, or meaning.
If you're a strategist, product builder, or brand leader reading this — you're not launching features anymore. You're shaping futures. The best immersive systems in the next five years won't be the most advanced. They'll be the most emotionally coherent. The ones that feel authored by the user, not imposed by the brand.
Start there. Ask: What kind of person does this experience allow someone to become?
If the answer isn't different than who they were before — you haven't built a system. You've shipped a novelty.
Victory Mode reminds us that loyalty isn't a state. It's a transformation. And when designed well, it's a shared one.
New on the GI Podcast:
If this sparked something — a thought, a tension, an idea you want to shape — I explore these themes further on the GI podcast. In Episode 90 (my AI Co-Hosts and I) talk about "Hero Mode Activated.” In Episode 88, we (my AI Co-Hosts and I) examine power and agency in the AI era through the lens of Palmer Luckey's Anduril x Meta's latest Defense Tech disruption.
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- Until next play
Dr. Elhanan Gazit, PhD Founder at Juloot
Lambrecht, A., Baumgarth, C., & Henseler, J. (2025). Holistic augmented reality brand equity (HARBE) model: building customer-based brand equity through augmented reality. Journal of Brand Management, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41262-025-00381-4