The Force Behind the Nike Empire by Jackie Krentzman, In a very short period of time, Phil Knight created one of the greatest American commerce stories of the 20th century," says sportsagent David Falk, who has frequently butted heads with Knight over the marketing and representation of athletes.
"But make no mistake: As athletically awesome and charismatic as Michael Jordan is, he alone did not make Nike as recognizable worldwide as Coke and McDonalds. Nor did he make "Just Do It" the slogan that best encapsulates the 1990s. Nike is a cultural icon because Knight understood and captured the zeitgeist of American pop culture and married it to sports. He found a way to harness society's worship of heroes, obsession with status symbols and predilection for singular, often rebellious figures. Nike's seductive marketing focuses squarely on a charismatic athlete or image, rarely even mentioning or showing the shoes.
The Nike swoosh is so ubiquitous that the name Nikes often omitted altogether. "Phil understands the symbolic power and attractiveness of sports, "says A. Michael Spence, dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a Nike board member. "And he helped build that connectional our culture.
"No company has put as much creative energy and resources into marketing celebrities as Nike. If, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century, then Nike isits Picasso, imaginatively expanding the parameters of the medium's use of the athlete-endorser.
"We didn't invent it," Knight acknowledges in an interview, "but we ratcheted it up several notches. "Nike engineered shoes for the top echelon of athletes to compete entrain in. At the same time, the company's mass marketing made the shoes so attractive and desirable that they became a de rigueur accessory to the American wardrobe and dream - even if increasingly sedentary teens only wore them to watch TV. "
An indifferent student, Knight graduated from Oregon with a degree in journalism in 1959. He enlisted in the army for a year (and served in the reserves for seven), then enrolled at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford. Stanford changed Knight's life. Finally, school wasn't drudgery. For the first time, he was excited to read about something other than sports.
And it was in Frank Shallenberger's small-business class that Knight conceived Nike. Shallenberger gave his class the following assignment: Invent a new business, describe its purpose and create a marketing plan. In his paper, "Can Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German Cameras?" Knight developed a blueprint for superior athletic shoes, produced inexpensively in Japan, where labor was cheaper.
"That class was an 'aha!' moment," Knight says. "First, Shallenberger defined the type of person who was an entrepreneur - and I realized he was talking to me. I remember after writing that paper, saying to myself: 'This is really what I would like to do.' "Knight streamlined the company (laying off 600 of the company's 2,000employees) and reorganized Nike along more conventional, corporations.
Where Knight was once famous for governing by instinct, today Nike studies reams of statistics and convenes a focus group before designing a new shoelace. The marketing budget grew, and so did the emphasis on design, Nike's euphemism for fashion. "in mind unlike existing companies who focused on their products appearance and durability. Nike infested their market with bright colors, new styles, and technology information pertaining to their products. This is why Steve Prefontaine and Nike were a tremendous tandem in the early years of Nike’s existence