What Nike’s Iconic Campaign Has Taught Us About Marketing
Have you ever heard of the saying imitation is the highest form of flattery? Well, marketers should take this more seriously. If you’re trying to come up with an ad campaign, you should probably look to others for success. What better of an example is there to look at than Nike.
What Successful Marketing Looks Like
Have you ever heard of the slogan “Just Do It”? Unless you have been living under a rock for the past forty years, of course you have. This marketing campaign speaks highly to the genius of Nike’s CEO Phil Knight. Nike’s success over the past couple of decades can definitely be traced back to this singular slogan. But how did this slogan make such massive waves like it did you might ask? Well, we must first take a look at the context.
Before Nike became the standard in the fitness industry, they focused exclusively on marathon runners. After a sudden fitness craze took place in the late 1980s, Nike tried to come up with a way to best their competitor Reebok — a brand that actually was selling more shoes than them at the time. Once Nike released the ad campaign with the slogan “Just Do It”, people were instantly hooked. It captured the feeling of the times: Don’t feel like going for a run? Just do it. Debating on whether to workout or not after a long day of work? Just Do It. No excuses, nothing complicated about the message, so straightforward that anyone could understand. According to a website called BrandChannel, Nike sales in 1988 were at $800 million; by 1998, sales exceeded $9.2 billion. So, how does a company try to replicate a successful campaign like Nike’s? First, you have to understand the basic principles of what marketing is and isn’t.
What it’s not
For starters, marketing isn’t sales. Marketing helps capture a customer’s attention in order to get them to be interested in purchasing your company’s product or service. On the other hand, sales helps seal the deal and convince the customer to make the purchase. So, to remember this, just think of it this way: marketing is the interest phase, and sales is where the actual transaction process takes place.
Many have the misconception that marketing is purely focused on advertising. Yes, helping raise awareness about your company’s product/service is important, but to say it’s solely advertising paints an incomplete picture.
It isn’t just content creation. It entirely depends on the company’s campaign objective. As you can see with Nike, they were set with their project of the future. This meant that they were firing on all cylinders trying to push products that aligned with their slogan “Just Do It”. For this reason, they probably were content with putting future ad campaign projects on the backburner. As a result, marketers had to find the best strategy to continue to get attention for the current project that’s under the company’s focal point. On the flip side of that, marketers have to be adept at managing multiple projects at once. Nike couldn’t have had the same success after all this time with just one slogan. Yes, Nike has persistently used “Just Do It” for their general marketing strategy, but they have also used the broadness of the slogan for a variety of different campaigns such as Collin Kaepernick’s “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
What it is
Marketers aren’t theorists, they continuously invent and tweak strategies they believe would best help the company’s product/service be seen. During the late 1980s, I’m sure the best way to do this was through billboards and T.V and radio commercials. However, with the advancement in technology, marketers have to constantly be up to date with the latest technical tools that could give their company an advantage in their campaign’s outreach. Think about it: who still watches cable T.V and listens to local radio? Personally, I haven’t in years (I’m a Netflix connoisseur). Therefore, marketers use tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Ad Manager, and MailChimp to accomplish this. For example, by using Google Analytics, marketers compile data to gain a better understanding of what customers want. Following this, marketers can better gauge how to approach ad campaigns and which demographic to target in a certain domain including social media sites like Facebook.
In conclusion
The odds that you hit a grand slam of a campaign like Nike did is probably unlikely. But the good thing is we could use the fundamentals of marketing to gain a better understanding of how they did it. This allows marketers to generate a plan that can potentially be the next Just Do It.
