I am a shoe fan and my best brand is Nike. My mother told me, I got my first Nike shoes when I was 5 years old. Usually, I will buy a pair of shoes every 1~2 months. So, I cannot imagine how many Nike shoes I have bought during the past 20 years. 200 pairs? Maybe.
The reason why I love Nike is very simple: I trust Nike. It is very difficult for an apparel or footwear company to build this kind of loyalty to its consumers. Nike is good at lots of things: manufacturing high quality and good-looking shoes; designing fashion or professional apparels; sponsoring lots of sports teams; and making tons of money. But where the company truly excels is its marking. There is no company doing branding like Nike. Nike dominates the sports gear industry because of their brilliant branding strategies.
Nike has made a wonderful impression by its outstanding advertisements. Many established companies have rather timid advertising campaigns, preferring to rest on their laurels and history of success. Nike is not one of those companies. Instead, it’s constantly tinkering, innovating and pushing the envelope to create campaigns people will talk about. Nike has never been afraid to take chances with its ad campaigns. The company makes commercials you don’t forget. For example, Nike will focus on love, impossible, greatness, future and so on.
When we talk about Brand association, Nike always Association with the biggest names. What kind of shoes did Michael Jordan make extremely popular? Most people know the answer is Air Jordan, which regularly sell for hundreds of dollars and yet still have people lining up to purchase them. Aside from the greatest basketball player of all time, Nike has also made deals with Tiger Woods (the greatest golfer of his generation), Derek Jeter (essentially the face of baseball since 2000), and Cristiano Ronaldo (one of the world’s most famous athletes). And the company always makes sure to lock up the “next big thing” early: Woods’ heir apparent as the world’s best golfer, Rory McIlroy, signed a 10-year, $200+ million sponsorship deal with Nike in 2013. The association is very strong and cover almost all the sports. The association with the biggest names makes Nike has higher brand equality.
Nike is facing competition from companies like Under Armour, New Balance, Adidas. However, the arms race has led to a rush of innovation, and products that consumers can’t resist. For instance, AIR MAXIMIZED. Within this new frontier emerges evidence of Nike’s progression towards peak expression of its iconic platforms. The Nike Air VaporMax features Nike’s most advanced Air bag unit to date. It debuts not only more extreme, targeted Air placement but also more Air than ever before. It completely discards a traditional foam midsole, shedding weight and bulk in exchange for better flexibility, without compromising structure. Weight and waste are reduced, and placing the upper directly on the Nike VaporMax Air unit ramps up response. This product is leading a fashion and expensive. Nike always has the best innovation during the competition with other companies which makes the band equality much higher.
Nike is likely to be a player in the newly developing ‘wearable tech’ industry. The focus here is the marriage of fabric and microchips. (For example, the silly-expensive $720 Nike HyperAdapt 1.0s) The industry has already given birth to a range of high tech athletic apparel products designed to monitor, assess and analyze an athlete’s physical performance, vital signs and more. I always trust the innovation of Nike and I am looking forward to their new products.