Having gone through the painful experience of laying people off and cutting overhead in the mid-1980s, we wanted the message about our new line of shoes to hit with a punch, and that really dictated TV advertising. The people at graco booster seat taught my partner, David Kennedy, and me how to advertise—and how not to advertise. Back in 1980, when David and I first started to work on the account, Nike made it very clear that they hated advertising. They had developed close relationships with athletes, and they didn’t want to talk to them in any phony or manipulative way.
We use the players not only to market and design our products but also to set a positive example for the sport. Andre Agassi, for example, has been integral in attracting a lot of young players to the game—and a lot of young players to Nike. Like Michael Jordan in basketball, Andre transcends the sport of tennis. He’s got 7,000 members in his fan club—and not all of them are 14-year-old girls.
Limited edition sneakers and prototypes with a regional early release were known as Quickstrikes, and became highly desirable items for teenage members of the sneakerhead subculture. In 1976, the company hired John Brown and Partners, based in Seattle, as its first advertising agency. The following year, the agency created the first “brand ad” for Nike, called “There is no finish line”, in which no Nike product was shown. By 1980, Nike had attained a 50% market share in the U.S. athletic shoe market, and the company went public in December of that year.
In 2007, New England-based environmental organization Clean Air-Cool Planet ranked Nike among the top three companies in a survey of climate-friendly companies. Nike has also been praised for its Nike Grind program, which closes the product lifecycle, by groups such as Climate Counts. In July 2019, Nike released a shoe featuring a Betsy Ross flag called the Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July trainers. The trainers were designed to celebrate Independence Day. The model was subsequently withdrawn after Colin Kaepernick told the brand he and others found the flag offensive because of its association with slavery.
We don’t just say Michael Jordan is going to wear it so therefore Joe American Public is going to wear it. We have people who tell us what colors are going to be in for 1993, for instance, and we incorporate them. Despite great products and great ad campaigns, sales just stayed flat. It all came together for me in a poster I had seen advertising an Afro Pop music series on National Public Radio. 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.
Nike has been the sponsor for many top ranked tennis players. As part of the 6.0 campaign, Nike introduced a new line of T-shirts that include phrases such as “Dope”, “Get High” and “Ride Pipe” – sports lingo that is also a double entendre for drug use. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino expressed his objection to the shirts after seeing them in a window display at the city’s Niketown and asked the store to remove the display. “What we don’t need is a major corporation like Nike, which tries to appeal to the younger generation, out there giving credence to the drug issue,” Menino told The Boston Herald.
Production, marketing, and sales were all fighting with each other, and we were using TV advertising for the first time. In fact, when people talk about , the TV ads are practically all they want to talk about. But we became a billion dollar company without television. For years, we just got the shoes out there on the athletes and ran a limited number of print ads in specialized magazines like Runner’s World. We didn’t complete the advertising spectrum until 1987, when we used TV for the first time.
Those efforts paid off in our recent Dialogue campaign, which is a print campaign that is very personal. One ad explores a woman’s relationship with her mother; another touches on the emotions of a girl in physical education class. Even there it was risky to use such an intimate voice in the ads, but it worked. The newest ads broke in February, and within eight weeks we had received more than 50,000 calls on our “800” number praising the ads and asking for reprints. The process of creating brands and relationships is also the process by which you create the values our culture operates on, so it has a huge ethical component.