Nike has poured millions of dollars into making its brand one of America's most powerful
HEN PHIL KNIGHT and-Bill Bowerman first formed Nike in 1968, they both had a passion for running. Bowerman was the track coach at the University of Oregon, a haven for world-class American runners. He constantly tested new sneakers to find the optimum weight, texture, and design to get his runners to move faster. Knight was the businessman, having recently graduated from Stanford University with an MBA. He had an idea about how to break open a sneaker market that was languishing in the United States. But these two entrepreneurs, both brilliant in their own disciplines, didn't have a purpose. There was no message to their ideas. No way to get the point across that their products were the best. Then an idea struck. Nike. The Greek Goddess of Victory. "Yes, our company and our products will stand for winning, for the ultimate victory," they said to each other. Simply put, this company would win. And that it has done since the early 1980s, when advertising and marketing turned Nike Inc. into the largest sneaker and sports apparel maker in the world. The brand is successful from Taiwan to Tivoli, and the reason is because the company's advertising message has remained strong and consistent throughout its history. "Nike created an image for itself in the late seventies and early eighties of an athlete's company, a winning company, says Brandon Steiner, president of Steiner Sports Marketing, a consulting firm in New York. "They've done well to stick to this message because consumers, mostly kids, like to associate themselves with winning companies and winning products." Indeed, Nike's advertising strategy always has been to create a brand with a winning image. Until recently, when the company has faced lagging athletic gear sales in the U.S., Nike never even ran product-related ad campaigns. "The company was always so confident that it's image could move products that it felt it never had to push the products themselves," says Dan Wieden, president of Wieden & Kennedy, the Portland, Oregon-based agency that has created Nike ads for 20 years. What Nike did run was clever, edgy advertising that grabbed consumers' attention. More important, the ad campaigns spoke right to the consumer, appealing to an athlete's need to win. In this respect, Nike describes its ad strategy as the "conversation of athletes," says Liz Dolan, Nike's vice president of marketing. "The company always strived to have the best people in any sport talk right to the consumers who would be buying shoes. The strategy was that high-profile, successful athletes would build a winning brand for consumers to associate with." Such world-class endorsers as Michael Jordan, John McEnroe, Andre Agassi, and Joan Benoit Samuelson built Nike in the 1980s. With these colorful and winning personalities driving creative advertising that made the American public talk, Nike became exactly what it was striving for: A winning company. It began to dominate the sneaker market, ringing up annual sales of more than $3 billion by 1993. "It was all a result of placing a consistent brand message within our ad campaigns," Wieden says. "No matter what we've ever done with Nike, the objective always has been to say the same thing in a fun, intriguing way." Which Nike continues to do today. Star athletes still drive its advertising, but the company has added some product spots to counteract a saturated sneaker market in the U.S. Yet, whether the campaign is pushing a new running sneaker or is simply an image spot featuring Tiger Woods, the strategy is always the same: Speak straight to consumers in a way they can relate to. "We always try to push our brand as something that customers can connect with," Dolan says. "Customer loyalty happens when a brand links itself with consumers That's what our advertising tries to do." ©Copyright 1998 Bill Communications Inc.