Nike is using one of the most successful advertising strategies: it promotes its products signing sponsorship contracts with professional sportsmen, celebrities, and college athletic teams.
The first Nike TV add was launched in 1982, created by a pioneer agency (Wieden + Kennedy), while the NY Marathon was being broadcasted. Their advertisements became better and better as time went by, and they were named Advertiser of the year event two times (1994 and 2003). The honor was given by the Cannes Advertising Festival, and Nike is the first company to have been awarded with it twice.
Nike is also a double winner of the Emmy Award for the best commercial – the first time was when they launched their ‘Morning After’ commercial, exposing the satiric perspective of morning running difficulties, and predicting the Y2K problem (2000), while the second time was for ‘Move’, a series of professional and ordinary athletic pursuits.
Nike was also among the first internet marketers using emailing to promote its products, and using narrowcast communication methods to develop their campaign and to boast sales.
Nike 6.0
During its 6.0 campaign, Nike did the brave step of introducing a line of printed T-Shirts using sentences such as ‘Get High’, ‘Dope’ and ‘Ride Pipe’, supposed to be a sports lingo rather than a phrase recommending drug use. Thomas Menino, the Mayor of Boston at the time, protested against these T-shirts, and asked Nike to remove them from their windows.
Nike protested, saying that the shirts had the purpose to promote extreme sports, and had nothing to do with condoning use of illegal drugs. Regardless of what they said, they were forced to remove the shirt line.
The apparel deal and NBA uniforms
In June 2015, Nike entered 8-years collaboration with NBA to be their league’s official supplier starting in 2017/2018. The contract replaced NBA’s long collaboration with Adidas, whose uniforms players had been wearing since 2006. It will be the first time for Nike’s logo to be displayed on official game jerseys, as this was not a practice even with previous suppliers.
Sponsorship
Nike has many famous athletes as its sponsors, this being their most powerful tactic for selling and promoting unique design and production technology.
The first professional athlete to become Nike’s sponsor was Romanian tennis player Ilie Năstase. The trend followed with runner Steve Prefontaine, a prized student of Bill Bowerman, an Oregon professor and co-founder of Nike. Nowadays, the corporate headquarters of Nike are named after Prefontaine.
There are many other field/track athletes who worked with Nike during the years, as for instance Carl Lewis, Sebastian Coe, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee. The fact that NBA’s star Michael Jordan signed the same contract in 1984 was critical for both the company’s and the player’s career and it boosted Nike’s publicity like never before. The joint of Spike Lee had a similar effect.
Ever since 2005, Nike is the official sponsor and kit provider for India’s cricket team.
What is known by almost everybody in the world is that Nike sponsors famous football players, working tightly with names such as Ronaldo, Cristiano Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Neymar, Drogba, Ibrahimovic, Totti, Rooney Donovan, Iniesta, and many others.
It also has significant presence in golf, due the fact that it signed a contract with Rory MclIroy, today’s leading golf player. The contract started in January, 2013, supposed to last for 10 years, and worth incredible $250 million. What was agreed is that the player is going to use Nike’s golf clubs, something Nick Faldo used to describe as a ‘risky step’ in McIlroy’s career.
Company overview
Nike, Inc. is American-founded, yet multinational company, developing, manufacturing, and designing sports equipment, apparel, footwear, and accessories for the worldwide market. Its headquarters are located in Beaverton, Oregon, and the metropolitan area of Portland.
Nowadays, Nike stands as one of the largest and most popular athletic shoes supplier in the world, being at the same time popular for its apparel and equipment solutions. It has an estimated revenue of US$24 billion per year (calculated until May 31, 2012), and an employee team of over 44, 000 people everywhere in the world. The value of the brand itself was estimated to be $19 billion (2014), and it has most likely grown after signing the NBA deal.
Nike was established on January 25, 1964, called Blue Ribbon Sports at the time. The founder was Phil Knight, and after Bill Bowermann joined him, the company was renamed in Nike, Inc (May, 1971). The name Nike is originally the name of the Greek goddess of victory.
Nike has a large range of branded products, such as Nike Pro, Nike +, Air Jordan, Nike Blazers, Foamposite, Nike Golf, Air Force 1, Air Max, Nike Dunk, Nike Skateboarding, etc. However, it also produces subsidiaries for Converse, Hurley International, and Brand Jordan. For quite a while, Nike possessed the ownership of Bauer Hockey (1995-2008), which was originally Umbro and Cole Haan’s line. At the time, the line was called Nike Hockey.
However, Nike doesn’t manufacture only equipment and sportswear, but it also operates its own retail stores known as Niketown. Working with many high-profile sportsmen and athletes worldwide, Nike has developed recognizable trademarks, as the Swoosh logo and the ‘Just Do It’ slogan.
It is hard to imagine that back in time, Nike (BRS) was only a university idea Phil Knight and his coach developed to help sportsmen find adequate equipment, and it grew to be such a giant in the apparel industry. At the time, Nike was still distributing foreign products, such as Japanese Onitsuka Tiger line (ASICS nowadays), making an insignificant portion of what it is earning today.
In 1976, they hired John Brown and partners, a Seattle company to be their advertising agency, and they developed the first ad of their brand known as ‘There is no finish line’. It was the first time that Nike became internationally famous, and by the end of 1980, it already owned 50% of the US show market.
Later on, they started working with Wieden+Kennedy, which took the credit for their most famous TV and print advertisements, and became therefore their leading advertising agency. Dan Wieden, a co-founder of the agency, was the one to invent the ‘Just Do It’ slogan, a simple phrase that boosted Nike’s popularity by the end of 1988, and was chosen to be one of the 5 most popular slogans of the 21st century.
The first ‘Just Do It’ commercial was featured by Walt Stack, and was first shown on TV on July 1, 1988. An interesting fact is that Wieden got inspired by Gary Gilmore’s last words prior to his execution to create the ‘Just Do It’ slogan.
During the 1980s, Nike enriched its production line with many original items, driven by the idea to encompass all sports, beliefs, and religions around the world. 1990 was the year when the company transferred its headquarters to an 8-buildings campus in Beaverton, Oregon.
More Nike print ads
Nike focused its attention on TV commercials over the years but they surely didn’t leave the print ads out in the cold. What’s interesting is that they’ve tried a different approach than the one in the TV spots.
In the prints they created advertisements that were trying to sell more or less directly the products made by the company, whereas the TV commercials were trying to work on the brand image. A game that only one of the top brands could be able to play. Of course, you can imagine that they couldn’t help it playing around in their print ads. So they did.
(this last one was not made by Nike but I had to feature it)