Nike Inc., Marketing Masters

Nike Inc., Marketing Masters

Uploaded by SamSkillz (552) on Feb 22, 2004

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Nike Inc., Research Paper

Basketball players "wanna be like Mike", but shoe companies "wanna be like NIKE." NIKE is the worlds #1 company and controls more than 40% of the US athletic shoe market. The company designs and sells shoes for just about every sport, including baseball, volleyball, cheerleading, and wrestling. NIKE also sells Cole Haan dress and casual shoes and a line of athletic wear and equipment, such as hockey sticks, skates, and timepieces. In addition, it operates NIKETOWN shoe and sportswear stores and is opening JORDAN in store outlets in suburban markets. NIKE sells its product to about 19,000 US accountants, in about 140 other countries, and online. Chairman, CEO, and co-founder Phil Knight owns. Nike Co. is very interesting, as well is a popular brand.

Nike, pronounced NI-KEY, is the winged goddess of victory according to Greek mythology. She sat at the side of Zeus, the ruler of the Olympian pantheon, in Olympia. A mystical presence, symbolizing victorious encounters, NIKE presided over history's earliest battlefields. A Greek would say, "When we go to battle, and win, we say it is NIKE." Synonymous with honored conquest; NIKE is the twentieth century footwear that lifts the world's greatest athletes to new levels of mastery and achievement. The NIKE "swoosh" embodies the spirit of the winged goddess who inspired the most courageous and chivalrous warriors at the dawn of civilization. Among artistic representations of Nike are the sculpture by Paeonius (c. 424 BC) and the "Nike of Samothrace." Rhodians probably erected the latter, discovered on Samothrace in 1863 and now in the Louvre Museum, Paris, about 203 BC to commemorate a sea battle. Excavations have shown that the sculpture was placed alighting on a flagship, which was set in the ground in such a way that it appeared to float.

If you were to break the word NIKE down, you would get Ni-key. The pronunciation for Nike is 'nI-kE. Its function is noun, and its etymology is Greek NiKE. If you defined the word NIKE, you would find out that it means the Greek goddess of victory.

Another meaning and definition of a word is SWOOSHING. Main entry: Swoosh, function is noun, and it is an act or instance of swooshing.

The origin of the swoosh dates back as far as 1971. Phil Knight was supplementing his modest income from Blue Ribbon Sports Inc. by teaching an accountant class at Portland State University. There he met Carolyn Davidson, a graphic design student, who was working on a multi-perspective drawing assignment in the hallway. He offered her a couple of bucks per hour if she would do some design work for his small company.

This all happened because "Representatives from Japan were coming for a presentation and Phil wanted some charts and graphs to show them" according to Davidson. Apparently this wasn't the last time Phil had asked Carolyn Davidson to create a design for him and Blue ribbon Sports. According to Davidson again, "Phil had asked her to work on a shoe stripe because supposedly Phil needed more inventory control." (In spring of 1992, the first shoe with the Nike Swoosh was introduced)

There have always been numerous predictions and questions asked about what Nike pays its people. An average salary for a Nike Spokesman (Tiger woods) is $55,555 dollars per day, which adds up to 20,277,575 dollars in a one years earned salary. Other salaries of Nike employees such as an Indonesian factory worker who is making shoes makes $1.25 per day and an on average of $456.25 per year. Lastly, Nike CEO Phil Knight is worth roughly over $5.8 billion dollars.

Nike ads like any other businesses require interpretation. Some of this reading goes on at the conscious level, some unconsciously. As opposed to extremists on either side of the interpretative question, I fall most nearly to the constructivist point of view in that I view meaning as interplay between text and the reader.

Ads work on a variety of different levels including, but not limited to, sign typology, paradigmatic meaning, psychological appeals, emotion, roles, values/beliefs, and knowledge. Again, the impact of an ad comes from the interplay between these various aspects of make-up and the reader's own notions about him/herself and the world.

Rubber-soled shoes were first mass-marketed as canvas-top "sneakers" by U.S. Rubber, with its keds® in 1917. But the elevation of athletic shoe manufacture to both a science and a fashion was due largely due to Phil Knight and Steve Bowerman of Oregon.

In 1958, Phil Knight, a business major a the University of Oregon, and a miler on the track team, shared with his coach, Bill Bowerman, a dissatisfaction with the clumsiness of American running shoes. They formed a company in 1964 to market a lighter and more comfortable shoe designed by Bowerman. In 1968, this company became NIKE, Inc.--- named for the Greek goddess of Victory. At first, Knight and Bowerman sold their shoes in person, at track meets across the Western US. Their company thrived through a classic combination of entrepreneurship and innovation. Bowerman's most memorable technical breakthrough was the optimal traction of the waffle soles he invented by shaping rubber in the waffle iron in his kitchen (1972). Other essential innovations were the wedged heel, the cushioned mid-sole, and nylon uppers. Knight's first great marketing ploy was announcing that "four of the top seven finishers" in the marathon at the 1972 Olympic Trials had worn Nike's (the first three runners, in fact, had worn West German Adidas®). Through the 80s and 90s, NIKE's advertisements helped make it by far the foremost retailer of athletic shoes world-wide, thanks to the endorsements from superstars like Michael Jordan, and the catchy slogans like "Just Do It." After dozens of years, patents and commercials, NIKE and its competitors created an absolute mania for elaborate athletic shoes, in the US and aboard. Though fashion remains a matter of taste, it is undeniable that both world-class athletes and even the average aerobics enthusiast owe a debt to the innovations of Phil knight and Bill Bowerman and to the industry they inspired. Phil Knight is the founder and CEO of the athletic gear company Nike. Knight and Nike helped start a sports business and revolution in the 1970's changing old- fashioned tennis shoes into highly specialized