How does Nike get its position？
It is no doubt that Nike is one of the most successful brands in the world. Nike was officially developed in 1971, the total assets of this brand reached 21.600 billion dollars in 2015.
Now it still a success in the keen competition of the market, acts as a leader in sports and fashion brand. There comes to the question, how does Nike get its position?
A brand should keep creating its brand value if the brand wants to play a role in the competitive market. And the brand equity can be used as the metrics to measure the value of a brand. In the famous Aaker model, brand equity is described as a combination of brand awareness, brand loyalty and brand associations(including perceived quality). This model can also be helpful in the discussion of the Nike case.
- Build A Recognizable Brand
What should you do if you want more customers to remember your brand? Make everything simple in the phase of brand establishment. Nike did a definitely good job in this phase.
Blue Ribbon Sports, the original brand of Nike, was initially operated as a distributor for Japanese shoe maker Onitsuka Tiger(now ASICS). The founders are track athlete Phil Knight and his coach Bill Bowerman. When the relationship between BRS and Onitsuka Tiger end, the founders decided to make their own running shoes brand.
They did a right decision to focus on their skilled area- running. With their athlete and coach experiences, they can easily get the key points about making sports shoes.
In order to build brand identity, the founder Phil Knight asked Carolyn Davidson, a student at Portland State University, for several possible logo designs and picked the Swoosh as his final choice. The simple design of Nike Swoosh logo played an important role in brand promoting.It also becomes one of the most recognized logos in this world.
And the brand was named as Nike which represents the goddess of victory. It is not only a meaningful name but also catchy enough for those who are not native English speakers.
In 1972, Nike signed with tennis player Ilie Năstase as its first professional athlete endorser.
In 1976, Nike hired its first advertising agency to do brand promotion.
Then in 1988, the famous Nike slogan “Just Do It” was introduced in their TV advertising.
When reviewing the establishment period of Nike, a clear guide of good brand awareness developing is listed.
Nike positioned itself as a professional sports shoe brand at first; then set up brand identity with recognizable name, logo, slogan; attracted more customers with celebrity charm and advertising.
During this period, Nike also obtained a bunch of loyal customers with its product quality.
With these achievements, brand equity of Nike was built successfully, but the competition between brands may never stop. There comes to another question: how does Nike maintain its position in these years?
- Maintain A Successful Brand
Brand loyalty seems to play the most important role in maintaining brand equity because no brand wants to see customer defection in competition.
”Having and holding customers is likely to be a competitive battle which each brand tries all efforts to win. They compete for functional attributes, distinctive services or innovative technologies (Aaker, 1991).”
After these years of hard work, Nike’s products now cover all categories which can meet the need of all customers. New products will be released every season to keep itself attractive.
Nike even developed smartphone apps to improve the emotional connection with customers. Take Nike+ Training app as an example, the app makes Nike part of your life when you train yourself with it. Just like a new ads format, Nike introduces you to a positive lifestyle and implies that you can do it with its help. It can act as a social software, Nike will get potential buyers when you sharing your training and moments in the app. This emotional branding also contributes a lot in building brand loyalty and brand association.
With these achievements , Nike successfully turns its popular impression from sports gear into unique lifestyle- Nike lifestyle. A product has limited service life but a lifestyle can last for a lifetime, that is how Nike differentiate itself from its competitors and maintain as a successful brand.
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