You know, this could actually be a pretty interesting thread, or it could be a way to take out your bad case of the Mondays angst on Nike.
If you were to ask every user what brand of running shoes is the most popular, I'd guess about 80% would say Nike, confidently.
But it's Brooks.
And Brooks' positioning is probably the exact opposite of Nike's, because they realize who the real customer is for running shoes. It's people that have no drive to look like Mo Farah and don't really care how fast they're running, just that they love it and it's a part of their life. Brooks positioning is In line with that philosophy, they will never talk about shoe weight or lab results, or any sort of perceived performance metric. It's just about finding the best, most comfortable shoe for you and "running happy" in them.
You won't see big advertising dollars or anywhere near as many sponsored athletes, and the ones that they do are very different than that of other brands.
But the question I'm trying to answer is what brand is the most ethical. Well the reality is that Brooks makes all of their stuff overseas in some sweatshop, and they might not knowingly sponsor cheating athletes, but it's because they didn't want to put themselves in that situation. Really every brand that is out there is in it to make money.
And as this thread shows, people talk about Nike utilizing child labor and sweat shops because Nike makes it easy to hate on them. We WANT to hate them. And it shows in market shares and LetsRun forums alike.
Anyways. It's a good topic, and would be great if we could talk about it a bit more.