4. What makes Nike's advertising tick?

Phil Knight, the co-founder and former Chief Executive of Nike, has an absolutely clear and committed strategy to use celebrity athlete endorsement. He has built Nike’s expansion into sport after sport from its athletics roots on the back of sporting masters. From the beginning Nike has been prepared to take a gamble on sporting bad boys others would not touch. It was a strategy that began with Ilie Nastase, the original tennis bad boy. The Romanian had the quality that has come to represent Nike and its advertising: attitude. After extraordinary growth, Nike became number one trainer manufacturer in the US. But then it experimented unsuccessfully with expansion into non-athletic shoes, and lost its number one position to Reebok.

Knight bet the future of the company on a new feature: a new air technology inside the trainer. Sales took off and the rest is history. This brings to globalization and the question of how American the brand can be. Nike uses a mix of global ad campaigns such as ‘good v evil’ and local advertising such as its famous poster campaigns in the UK. Marketing directors at Nike do not rely on market research pre-testing which often reduces the impact of more experimental commercials. There is also the long relationship with one of the world’s best ad agencies. Things only happen in Nike ads that sportsmen and women can really do.