Introduction
To say Nike is doing something right is an understatement and this paper investigates why by analysing its current position in the market and the history of its advertising activities. Additionally, a high-level review of its overarching digital strategy will be undertaken and a deeper analysis of its current digital media campaigns. The aims of this research are twofold: to gain greater understanding of Nike’s overarching Digital Marketing Strategy and campaigns; and from this analysis to generate evidence-based recommendations on possible marketing strategy shifts.
Market Position
Nike is unquestionably the global leader in athletic apparel outstripping Adidas (its closest competitor) by $19,417 Million in sales.
Beyond athletic apparel and looking at apparel in general Nike annihilates its competition, whether luxury apparel brand or high street clothier with its brand value at nearly double that of its nearest competitor, luxury brand Gucci.
Nike’s Marketing History
Looking at its marketing over the last several decades Nike has gone from strength to strength.
The Invention of Jogging
Nike has been credited with essentially creating the hobby of running in the United States with its content marketing strategy of 1966, creating the pamphlet entitled “Jogging” (Ryan, 2016).
Just Do it
In 1988 the iconic “Just Do It” campaign was unveiled with the unconventional athlete Walt Stack, an 80-year-old marathon runner (Joseph, 2013); the use of amateur athletes is a theme that carries on to this day in Nike ads, presumably saying: “anyone can be an athlete, why not you? Just do it”. It can be argued that this slogan encouraging everyone, not just professional athletes, to get out there and “just do it” struck a chord that still resonates today and is one of the key factors in Nike’s success. This 1988 ad was a bit of a hail Mary: they had recently lost their footing as the biggest athletic shoe vendor in the US, in less than 2 years they would regain that spot and never slip again (De Luce, 2018).
Celebrity Endorsements
Nike has long been associated with multi-million dollar celebrity endorsements from Michael Jordan to Ronaldo (Badenhausen, 2016) but they also sponsor Olympic athletes and lesser known professional athletes with a strong focus on supporting women’s sports (Witte, 2019).
Influencer Marketing
Nike has engaged in influencer marketing for some time across many digital platforms, notably in 2017 with a campaign aimed at youth influencers (Hoos, 2019). Their combination of celebrity endorsement and lesser known YouTube influencer marketing like with the 2017 video produced by gamer and YouTube influencer Harry Lewis featuring Ronaldo was huge success clocking over 60 million views to date (wroetoshaw, 2017).
Award Winning Ads & Politics
Nike has produced several award winning ads over the years, notably 2 Emmy winning ads including the 2018 ad featuring Colin Kaepernick which garnered much controversy as “too political”; even with many threatening a boycott the campaign was a success with the stock price surging and the company increasing in value by 6 billion within two weeks of that ad (Draper and Creswell, 2019). This marked a shift in Nike’s persona: although they had never been shy of controversy (Joseph, 2013), they were never so overtly political. Looking at any of their social media pages now with #BlackLivesMatter and #StopAsianHate prominently featured, it appears that politics is now firmly a part of their brand identity.
Analysis of Nike’s Digital Strategy
Nike’s Social Media footprint
Nike has several Instagram accounts but for the purposes of this report their primary Instagram account was focused on. As seen in Figure 3 Mike’s Instagram page has both the largest number of followers and the highest engagement of any platform. To discover the potential user journey, on May 24th the researcher followed all Nike Instagram channels, 12 hours later received a Nike sponsored ad in feed, clicked through, accepted cookies, was invited to join the mailing list, highly visible was signage for 30% off everything for Nike members (which pushes one to download the app), there was also offering a 10% student discount save the add to collection.
Analysing the Instagram posts themselves there are some key takeaways: nearly all recent posts are video and feature non-traditional sports, with young, ethnically diverse athletes, some with non-traditionally “athletic” body types. Notably absent in recent posts are the mega-celebrity faces often associated with Nike. Also notably absent are white male faces, the most recent being from December 2019. This is a clear shift in strategy as when one looks back at posts from 2018 and before: then posts were all still-photos and primarily focused on major sports stars like Federer, Nadal, Serna Williams, Major League Baseball players, etc.
The shift seems to echo the initial “Just Do It” ads featuring non-traditional athletes, saying this is a brand for everyone who calls themselves an athlete, not just sports enthusiasts/fans. It takes a strong, clear, and consistent socio-political stand. The notable difference from the original just do it at featuring an octogenarian marathon runner is that those featured are invariably young, most appearing to be in their early twenties.
YouTube
Nike’s YouTube channel echoes the feeling of its Instagram feed as many of the videos featured on Instagram are clips from videos posted on YouTube. On YouTube however the main page houses many play lists which reflect the multiple Instagram pages but keep them under one virtual roof. This gives a visitor the ability to see the many sides of Nike’s brand image from the entertaining, to the political, to the emotional all at once. On auto play is a video “celebrating black futures in sport and culture”.
Further down the page are playlists with workouts, nutrition advice, kid’s activities and more which shows a great deal of diversity in this digital offering, but the overall feel of the YouTube page is, again: activist, young, ethnically diverse, athletes-of-all-kinds.
In stark contrast, Nike’s presence on Facebook is now all but non-existent with its last post being from 2018 featuring the white face of Roger Federer.
TikToK
Nike’s TikTok presence is exclusively #BreakItDown videos in partnership with influencers, most of whom have over 500,000 followers and many with several million. These videos show the influencer “breaking down” a dance, exercise, sports play, etc. teaching viewers how to do something. In all but one video posted in May, the Nike logo was clearly visible on the influencers apparel. The tone here is very different that Instagram and YouTube as it is solely one of entertainment and fun, but a common thread with other channels is the diverse set of young athletes and influencers.
Snap Chat & LinkedIn
As it’s primarily focused on communicating with actual friends it’s difficult to engage with brands on Snapchat. When one follows Nike on Snapchat there are 4 “lenses” that one can use to engage with Nike branded content in a gamified way and a link to their website that offers a 30% discount to members, encouraging users to download the app. This appears to be an abandoned strategy.
On LinkedIn the focus is primarily on jobs and the business in general rather than engaging with potential customers.
Other Digital Channels
Searching “trainers for men” on Google Chrome the following search results are found indicating that Nike is using paid advertisements through google AdWords.
In organic search results, Nike’s official website comes up 5th, again mentioning the 30% off, which when clicked drives one to become a member through their website rather than their mobile app.
Mobile Application
Based on the above research, a clear focus of Nike’s digital strategy is to drive users to their mobile app. On entering the app, one is prompted to become a member and asked a few questions about interests: Men’s shoes? Men’s apparel? What sports? Shoe Size? Sustainability? The app is rich with content, customised to the user: shoe recommendations are shown only in the size chosen, which is helpful as finding the right size of shoe is often challenging for those with larger or smaller than normal feet. There are also games, inspirational videos, and blog-like content. The app appears to be built for continued engagement beyond merely shopping and aimed at building a brand ecosystem that contributes to brand loyalty.
Digital Strategy Conclusions
It seems clear that Nike’s digital strategy is focused primarily on Instagram, with YouTube being a close second, and that all digital channels are pointing users towards downloading the app and becoming a member of the Nike ecosystem. Since 2018 there has been a departure from celebrity endorsements and a focus on athletes that are more relatable and closer to the user/viewer in status.
The lack of content on Facebook seems a missed opportunity as Facebook is still the largest player in social media outstripping Instagram by more than double the global usage (We Are Social, Hootsuite, DataReportal, 2021). Even merely pushing content from Instagram would surely have some effect.
Although potentially very engaging such a focus on the mobile app may be a weak point as many may be apprehensive about downloading an app, giving personal information, etc. and may only be effective on younger digital natives.
This strategy seems geared towards a young target audience based on the faces seen, youthful energy of the content, and the digital platforms employed. The following analysis of brand identity and creative content will attempt to understand more fully the target audience and the emotional and social relationship made with that audience.
Further Analysis
Current Brand Identity
Using Kapferer’s Brand Identity Prism framework (Kapferer, 2008) by analysing Nike’s media activity and content the following has been created:
Nike tells stories of diverse athletes using the media of video, which harkens back to its pre-digital strategy when the bulk of advertising energy and money was spent on large TV campaigns such as “Just Do it”. The main difference between then and now is the lack of celebrity athlete presence – over the last two years of posts celebrities are nearly non-existent.
One key theme that comes up again and again seems to be the idea that anyone can be an athlete and that you can achieve your goals through hard work. Another theme is that there is no one type of athlete, body type, gender, disability don’t matter: just do it. “Sportsmanship” or perhaps “sportsPERSONship” as a culture is foregrounded.
Creative Approach, Using Brand Identity
The creative content tells a clear story of Nike’s brand identity, personality, and culture: confident, inclusive, activist; speaking directly to and inspiring viewers to get out there and “Just Do It”.
Nike’s creative content fits neatly into the “Model to Explain Ad Liking” put forth by Dr Rachel Kennedy, based on Erik du Plessis COMMAP model of communication (Sharp, 2010)
Nike does an excellent job of creating ads that follow this framework for ad liking. For example: the recent “Play New” spot (Nike, 2021) featuring professional athletes trying new sports and failing miserable taps into both empathy and entertainment: it’s funny and very relatable content. From 2018 with a focus on raising awareness of racial injustice there is also a concentration on relevant news combined with empathy in the videos and posts. Emotions are thought to be a key factor in ad liking as well as brand affinity (du Plessis, 2005) and Nike seems to make an effort to create a deep emotional connection to a young, inspirationally athletic, perhaps marginalised target audience.
New Strategic Digital Marketing Approach
As stated in the first line of this paper: Nike is doing something right… but there is always room for improvement. To that end, the following recommendations are derived from the above analysis.
Continue Disrupting the 4Cs Framework
It can be argued that Nike has both used and disrupted the 4 Cs framework (seen below in figure 8) regarding personal selling with their use of influencers and micro influencers. In the past, personal selling is associated with high costs but the effectiveness of this activity has made it worth that cost (Fill, 2009); perhaps a stretch, but it can be argued that Nike’s leveraging of influencer marketing is an augmentation of personal selling: less personal but much cheaper, i.e., in exchange for a pair of Nike shoes a “real person” (influencer), that one follows online and has gotten to know over time, is telling them (personally it feels) about a product. This should not be confused with celebrity endorsements such as Ronaldo’s $1 Bn lifetime contract with Nike (Badenhausen, 2016) which sits in the high-cost advertising realm of the 4 Cs framework, but it’s the combination of these techniques that is quite disruptive: personalising the use of larger celebrities and increasing the spread of the communications.
Their brilliant combination of high-cost celebrity endorsement and the lower-cost influencer may increase credibility across all channels including advertising by humanising the legendary showing them with “real people”, it (arguably) reduces costs by leveraging paid for assets in new ways, and it increases control of big advertising/celebrity endorsement.
Recommendation:
Get back to using this strategy which seems to have been all but abandoned since 2018, perhaps due to the shift in brand personality towards more activist and real people focused. It can be leveraged with in the current strategy by partnering celebrities already under contract with appropriate influencers and pushing out content on all channels. TikTok may be a venue where this can be leveraged to great effect, if done well.
Re-engage With Your Roots
As previously mentioned, Nike essentially invented running culture in the late 60s; Nike used an octogenarian in the first “Just Do It” campaign - but based on this research Nike’s strategy has abandoned this older generation, the same generation that bought the sneakers originally. The folks that originally bought the sneakers in the 60s and 70s are now 60+ and research shows that only 16% of people over 60 consider Nike their favourite sports wear brand when compared to 29% of 18–29-year-olds and 30% of 30–59-year-olds; 24% of people over 60 say they don’t have a favourite sports brand at all (Statista, 2018). This is a missed opportunity.
Recommendations:
Re-engage with the Baby-Boomer demographic: they built the brand by being the young generation that was induced to run by Nike starting in the late 60s and now they have a disposable income are trying to stave off heart disease and diabetes- what better time to focus on health.
Possibly reusing the first Just do it campaign featuring an 80-year-old marathon runner and updating with similar athletes using today’s baby-boomer triathletes, marathon runners, body builders etc. could be a good start.
Politics need not be abandoned: In the US, Biden won with messages not dissimilar to those currently seen in Nike’s communications: diversity, inclusion, #BlackLivesMatter; Biden could not win without the Baby Boomer vote. There is an opportunity to include Baby Boomers in this message of inclusion: they may feel marginalised as well, fighting agism can become part of the narrative of “anyone can be an athlete”.
Celebrity endorsements with aged 60+ athletes like Joe Montana, himself a baby boomer and still in great shape, may help for the older generation to feel like they are being spoken to.
Use of current celebrity endorsers could also be leveraged by (when appropriate) having their athletic parents join in ads, commercials, and digital shorts. The same could also apply to influencers and micro-influencers.
Re-engage with Facebook
As mentioned above, Facebook is still the global leader in social media, and this holds true in both the UK and the United States. even simply pushing the Instagram content to Facebook which is free and automated seems a simple solution. However, a renewed Facebook campaign aimed at this older demographic may be wise as new research shows that Baby Boomers may rely heavily on Facebook to stay connected with family and friends (Sheldon, Antony and Ware, 2021).
Conclusion
Nike has become a global leader in sport and fitness apparel through consistent yet evolving brand strategy and innovative marketing since the 1960s. They have embraced the digital age and make use of nearly all the most popular digital media platforms with the notable exception of Facebook. The current overarching digital campaign is one based on its brand identity, embodying the “Just Do It” attitude with a new focus aimed at diversity and inclusion. This strategy is effectively used both to entertain and create an emotional response which effectively creates “likable” advertisements. Room for improvement can be found in the following areas: tap into the equity already invested in celebrity endorsements and leverage it within the current strategy; engage in further inclusion with diverse age groups; consistently use all appropriate digital tools such as Facebook to further your message.