Michael has become more mature and contemplative in recent years, but he still plays very exciting basketball, so the shoe had to incorporate those traits as well. The imagery in the poster was very exciting and strong and slightly ethnic. I showed Michael the poster, and he thought it elicited the right emotion, so I drew from that. We came up with a shoe that used very rich, sophisticated colors but in a jazzy way. So I kept thinking about the outdoors, and that led to Native Americans, who did everything outdoors—from their tribal rituals to their daily chores.
What did they wear? Moccasins, which are typically comfortable and pliable. And that led to the idea of a high-tech, high-performance moccasin. The soles are flexible so you can pad down the trail, the leather is thin and lightweight, the outsole has a low profile, and the colors are earthy. Stories about how we arrived at particular designs may be entertaining, but the storytelling also helps us explain the shoes to retailers, sales reps, consumers, and other people in the company. In the early days, when we were just a running shoe company and almost all our employees were runners, we understood the consumer very well.
There is no shoe school, so where do you recruit people for a company that develops and markets running shoes? The running track. It made sense, and it worked. We and the consumer were one and the same. When we started making shoes for basketball, tennis, and football, we did essentially the same thing we had done in running. We got to know the players at the top of the game and did everything we could to understand what they needed, both from a technological and a design perspective.
Our engineers and designers spent a lot of time talking to the athletes about what they needed both functionally and aesthetically.
It was effective—to a point. But we were missing something. Despite great products and great ad campaigns, sales just stayed flat. We were missing an immense group. We saw them as being at the top of a pyramid, with weekend jocks in the middle of the pyramid, and everybody else who wore athletic shoes at the bottom. But that was an oversimplification. Just take something simple like the color of the shoe. One of our great racing shoes, the Sock Racer, failed for exactly that reason: we made it bright bumble-bee yellow, and it turned everybody off.
To understand the rest of the pyramid, we do a lot of work at the grass-roots level. We go to amateur sports events and spend time at gyms and tennis courts talking to people. We have people who tell us what colors are going to be in for , for instance, and we incorporate them. Beyond that, we do some fairly typical kinds of market research, but lots of it—spending time in stores and watching what happens across the counter, getting reports from dealers, doing focus groups, tracking responses to our ads.
We just sort of factor all that information into the computer between the ears and come up with conclusions. Understanding the consumer is just part of good marketing. You also have to understand the brand. That whole experience forced us to define what the Nike brand really meant, and it taught us the importance of focus. Without focus, the whole brand is at risk. The ends of the earth might be right off that ledge! Once you say that, you have focus, and you can automatically rule out certain options.
To a point. A brand is something that has a clear-cut identity among consumers, which a company creates by sending out a clear, consistent message over a period of years until it achieves a critical mass of marketing. Otherwise the meaning gets fuzzy and confused, and before long, the brand is on the way out.
Look at the Nike brand. From the start, everybody understood that Nike was a running shoe company, and the brand stood for excellence in track and field. It was a very clear message, and Nike was very successful.
But casual shoes sent a different message. People got confused, and Nike began to lose its magic. Retailers were unenthusiastic, athletes were looking at the alternatives, and sales slowed. So not only was the casual shoe effort a failure, but it was diluting our trademark and hurting us in running.
By breaking things into digestible chunks and creating separate brands or sub-brands to represent them. Have I taken the thing too far? What we hit on in the mids was the Air Jordan basketball shoe. Its success showed us that slicing things up into digestible chunks was the wave of the future.
The Air Jordan project was the result of a concerted effort to shake things up. With sales stagnating, we knew we had to do more than produce another great Nike running shoe. So we created a whole new segment within Nike focused on basketball, and we borrowed the air-cushion technology we had used in running shoes to make an air-cushioned basketball shoe.
Basketball, unlike casual shoes, was all about performance, so it fit under the Nike umbrella. And the shoe itself was terrific. It was so colorful that the NBA banned it—which was great! Michael Jordan wore the shoes despite being threatened with fines, and, of course, he played like no one has ever played before.
It was everything you could ask for, and sales just took off. To recruit young tennis players and sign them to endorsement contracts to wear and promote Nike tennis shoes and apparel, I scout the junior tennis circuit for athletes with a combination of talent, character, and style. Talent is the most important ingredient for a Nike athlete.
To promote our shoes, a player has to have a chance at being one of the best in the game. Character is also important.
By getting to know athletes in their early teens, I can tell if they are the type of people who would work well with Nike over the long term. Are they committed to the sport? Do they have a sense of humor? Do they have an attitude that the public will embrace? There are plenty of players who meet the first two requirements, but only Nike athletes meet the third: a distinctive sense of style.
People expect Nike to perform to a high standard and to make a statement at the same time. Our athletes do the same thing. When I started at Nike tennis, John McEnroe was the most visible player in the world, and he was already part of the Nike family.
He epitomized the type of player Nike wanted in its shoes—talented, dedicated, and loud. He broke racquets, drew fines, and, most of all, won matches. Nike made a promise to their consumers to maintain the highest possible quality they can. They listened to athletes and designed their shoes to meet endurance, durability and performance standards specifically.
Nike did not follow the way of the other shoe brands by adding garments into their product to meet fashion statements. Instead, they stuck to tried and true quality and maintained using leather in their products.
One of the fastest rising trends in the world of fashion today is comfort. With the advent of yoga pants and comfortable, stretchy clothes, women are starting to focus more on what makes them feel the best they can and as comfortable as they can. Nike pays attention to these trends. As a result, Nike has opened its first store, targeting women and its promotional technique?
Nike has decided that if they are going to keep being the world leader in the athletic shoe industry that they need to focus on what fashion styles are trending.
Nike has worked at maintaining quality, durability, performance, and added to the mix, comfort. You can put on a pair of Nike shoes and feel like they belong on your feet.
It boosts your customers buying culture as-as well recommend more consumers to buy your products. The consistent production of high-quality clothing both in the fashion industry and in the world of sports has facilitated the prolonged dominance of the Nike Company since it first entered the foreign market. Since its inception, the Nike Company has been ranked amongst the topmost companies to deliver quality shoes both for athletes and fashion.
The company has been effective to meet its consumer needs maintaining a good brand image for its shoe products over the years. It is also important to mention that Nike forms the first company ever to produce shoes that suit distance runners with low weight. It continues to deliver trendy models of shoes per the fashion of the day. The company ensures constant growth by producing quality products for both male and female use. Also, the target market has been increasing slowly because shoes produced are meant for both adults and children.
So why is Nike so popular as compared to other competitors? This list is endless. Nike remains and will continue being one of the largest shoe companies that produce attractive and good quality footwear that will serve you for years.
You can visit our site for more resourceful information showing why and how Nike has remained to be so popular over the years.
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Here are four of the reasons why Nike is the reigning king of branding:. What kind of shoes did Michael Jordan make extremely popular? Most people know the answer is Air Jordans, which regularly sell for hundreds of dollars and yet still have people lining up to purchase them.
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