Marketing Excellence- Nike

MARKETING EXCELLENCE- NIKE

The case explains how Nike successfully marketed it products by getting it endorsed through top athletes, who influence the buying decision of brands and products of others and created its brand image by associating the products with their persona. By signing the Michael Jordan and relating it air Jordan shoes to his superior performance ,it generated great revenues in a year alone, and its “just do it” ad campaign manifested brand’s attitude of self-empowerment through sports. Nike customized its marketing strategy depending upon the market as it did at the time of expansion to Europe by focussing on soccer rather than the aggressive US style ads and sponsored local club, and fortunately the Brazilian team for world cup in 1994 which they won an authenticated Nike’s image into brand representing emotion allegiance and identification due to which over next decade overseas revenue for the first time passed US revenues.

It diversified the product line by acquiring a British soccer related by acquiring British company manufacturing.

The recent innovation by introducing technology in shoes by entering partnership with apple is Nike+ and marketed it by hosting largest and only global virtual race. With such an effective marketing strategies Nike today enjoys 31 % market share globally and 50% in US and is the top athletic apparel and footwear manufacture in the world.

MARKETING MYOPIA

The case argues about how marketing myopia resulted in decline and it is still affecting the growth industries. Basically Marketing myopia is short-sightedness in vision of the firm for achieving higher revenues by concentrating on product upgradation and neglecting customer needs and ways to satisfy them with organizations offerings through the products and services. The industries assumed themselves to be riding some automatic growth escalator and descend themselves into stagnation. The four conditions that make industries to have such assumptions are : 1) The belief that growth is assured by expanding and more affluent population. 2) The belief that there is no competitive substitute for the industry’s major products.

3) Too much faith in mass production and in the advantage of rapidly declining unit costs as output rises. 4) Preoccupation with a product that lends itself to carefully controlled scientific experimentation, improvement and manufacturing cost reduction. The railroads are in trouble for they assumed themselves to be in railroads business rather than in transportation business that stopped growth. They don’t lack opportunity but some of managerial imaginativeness and audacity that made car trucks or airplanes have. Aluminium industry has still continued to be growth industries due to efforts made for creating new customer satisfying uses. By Kaiser Aluminium and Chemical Corporation and Reynolds metals company.

The Dry Cleaning, electrical utilities, grocery store led to their destruction by not responding to customer’s demands. Even the petroleum industry is very much persuaded that there is no competitive substitute for their major product gasoline. None of them are enthusiastically researching fuel cells, batteries, solar power plants which are getting increasing attention and are neglecting continuous customer needs. These industries try to discover more convincing advertising themes, more effective sales promotional drives, what the market shares of the various companies are, what people like or dislike about service station dealers and oil companies and so forth. Nobody seems as interested in probing deeply into the basic human needs that the industry might be trying to satisfy as in probing into the basic properties of the raw material that the companies work with in trying to deliver customer satisfactions.