Nobody can ignore the great success Nike made in past years, feel the proactive sport spirit through Nike’s impressive words. Nike not only moved the sport person, but also stimulated every people’s sport heart. But how Nike found out the way to lead the market, lead the competitors, lead the consumers, What is essential of product, marketing and advertising in Nike’s perspective? I accidently got the inspirational answer in my college’s book “Advertising management”, to happily share with you, and I noticed this article is pressed on Harvard Business Review on 1992, very old, but I think it still useful especially for China market.

Considered the original text is too long to type it out, I just shared some paragraph which interesting.

Can you expand a brand without losing focus?
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. The thing is, once you hit the critical mass, you can’t push it much further. 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.

How, then, has Nike been able to grow so much?
By breaking things into digestible chunks and creating separate brands or sub-brands to represent them. If you have something that’s working, you can try to expand it, but first you have to ask, does this expansion dilute the big effort? Have I taken the thing too far? When you come to the conclusion that you have ---- through conversations with athlete, your own judgment, what’s happening in retail stores or focus groups ---- then you have to ceate another category.

Have you continue to slice up the Nike umbrella since then?
We’ve created lots of new categories under the Nike brand, everything from cross-training and water sports to outdoors and walking. But what’s interesting is that we’ve sliced up some of the categories themselves.
Take basketball. Air Jordan had two great years, and then it fell on its face. So we started asking ourselves, are we trying to stretch Air Jordan too far? Is Air Jordan 70% of basketball? Or is it 25% of basketball? As we thought about it, we realized that there are different styles of playing basket ball. Not every great plays has the style of Michael Jordan, and if we tried to make Air Jordan appeal to everyone, it would lose its meaning. We had to slice up basketball itself.
Two new segments came out of that: Force, which is represented by David Robinson and Charles Barkley, and Flight, represented by Scottie Pippin. Force shoes are more stable and better suited to the aggressive, muscular styles of David Robinson and Charles Barkley. Flight shoes, on the other hand, are more flexible and lighter in weight, so they work better for a quick, high-flying style like Scottie Pippin’s.

How you exhausted the list of things that fit under the Nike umbrella?
Actually, we’re now pushing the limits of the Nike brand by going into fitness. The core consumer in fitness is a little different from the core consumer in sports. Fitness activities tend to be individual pursuits ---- things like hiking, bicycling, weight-lifting, and wind surfing. And even within the fitness category, there are important differences. We found that men do fitness activities because they want to be stronger or live longer or get their heart rate or blood pressure down. Their objective are rather limited. But women do it as sort of a self-actualization thing, as part of whole package of what they’re about.

Did TV change the character or image your company projected?
Not really, because our basic beliefs about advertising didn’t change. We’ve always believe that to success with the consumer, you have to wake him up. There are 50 different competitors in the athletic shoe business. If you do the same thing you’ve done before or that somebody else is doing, you won’t last more than one or two seasons.
And from beginning, we’ve tried to create an emotional tie with the consumer. Why do people get married ---- or do anything? Because of emotion ties. That’s what builds long-term relationship with consumer, and that’s what our campaign are about. That approach distinguish us from a lot of other companies, including Reebod. Their campaigns aren’t always bad ---- their Air-out Jordan campaign last worked well ---- but it’s very transaction oriented. Our advertising tries to link consumer to the Nike brand through the emotion of sports and fitness. We show competition, determination, achievement, fun, and even the spiritual rewards of participating in those activities.

How do you wake up the consumer?
By doing new things. Innovation is part of our heritage, but it also happens to be good marketing. We need a way of making sure people hear our message through all the clutter. In 24 words or less, that means innovative advertising ---- but innovative in a way that captures the athletes’ true nature. Bo Jackson and Michael Jordan stand for different things. Characterizing them accurately and tying them to products the athletes really use can be very powerful.
Of course, trying to wake people up can be risky, especially since we generally don’t pre-test our ads. We test the concepts beforehand, but we believe that the only way to know if an ad works is to run it and gauge the response.

How do Nike’s TV ads create emotional ties with buying public?
You have to be creative, but what really matters in the long run is that the message means something. That’s why you have start with a good product. You can’t create a emotion tie with a bad product because it’s not honest. It doesn’t have any meaning, and people will find that out eventually. You have to convey what the company is really all about, what it is that Nike really trying to do.
That’s something Wieden & Kennedy, our advertising agency, is very good at. Lots of people say Nike is successful because our ad agency is do good, but isn’t it funny that the agency had been around for 20 years and nobody had ever heard of it? It’s not just that they’re creative. What makes Wieden & Kennedy successful with Nike is that they take the time to grind it out. They spent countless hours trying to figure out what the product is, what the message is, what the theme is, what the athletes are all about, what emotion is involved. They try to extract something that’s meaningful, an honest message that is true to who we are. And we’re very open to that way of working, so the chemistry is good.

What’s the advantage of using famous athletes in your advertising?
It saves us a lot of time. Sports is at the heart of American culture, so a lot of emotion already exists around it. Emotions are always hard to explain, but there’s something inspirational about watching athletes push the limits of performance. You can’t explain much in 60 seconds, but when you show Michael Jordan, you don’t have to. People already know a lot about him. It’s that simple.
The trick is athletes who not only can win but can stir up emotion. We want someone the public is going to love or hate, not just the leading scorer. Jack Nicklaus was a better golfer than Alnold Palmer, but Plamer was the better endorsement because of his personality.