A Case Study Of Nike's Customer Value - Driven Marketing : Engaging Customers and Building Brand Community

The Nike "swoosh"-it's everywhere! Just for fun, try counting the swooshes whenever you pick up the sports pages or watch a basketball game or tune into a televised soccer match. Over the past 50 years, through innovative marketing, Nike has built the ever-present swoosh into one of the world's best-known brand symbols.

Product innovation has always been a cornerstone of Nike's success. Nike makes outstanding shoes, clothing, and gear, whether for basketball, football, and baseball or golf, skateboarding, wall climbing, bicycling, and hiking. But from the start, a brash, young Nike revolutionized sports marketing. To build image and market share, the brand lavishly outspent competitors on big-name endorsements, splashy promotional events, and big-budget, in-your-face "Just do it" ads. Whereas competitors stressed technical performance, Nike built customer engagement and relationships. Beyond shoes, Nike marketed a way of life, a genuine passion for sports, a "just-do-it" attitude.

Customers didn't just wear their Nikes, they experienced them. As the company once stated on its web page, "Nike has always known the truth-it's not so much the shoes but where they take you." Nike's mission isn't to make better gear, it's to help and inspire everyday athletes to do their very best. Few brands have become more ever-present and valued than Nike in their customers' lives and conversations.

Whether customers connect with Nike through ads, in-person events at Niketown stores, a local Nike running club, a Nike+ app, or one of the company's profusion of community web and social media sites, more and more people are bonding closely with the Nike brand. Connecting once required simply outspending competitors on big media ads and celebrity endorsers that talk at customers. But in these digital times, Nike is forging a new kind of brand-customer connection-a deeper, more personal, more engaging one. Nike still invests heavily in traditional advertising. But the brand now spends a lion's share of its hefty marketing budget on digital and social media marketing that interacts with customers to build brand engagement, advocacy, and community.

Nike's innovative use of online, mobile, and social media recently earned the brand the title of "top genius” in "digital IQ" among 42 sportswear companies in one digital consultancy's rankings. Nike also placed first in creating brand "tribes"-large groups of highly engaged users- with the help of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. For example, the main Nike Facebook page has more than 23 million Likes. The Nike Soccer page adds another 42 million, the Nike Basketball page 7 million more, and Nike Running another 6 million. More than just numbers, Nike's social media presence engages customers at a high level, gets them talking with each other about the brand, and weaves the brand into their daily lives.

Nike excels at cross-media campaigns that integrate digital media with traditional tools to connect with customers. An example is Nike's recent "Risk Everything" campaign, specially designed around the FIFA World Cup in Brazil. The Risk Everything campaign began with captivating four to five-minute videos embedded in Nike social media sites and its own Risk Everything website. The campaign-featuring Nike-sponsored soccer superstars such as Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo, England's Wayne Rooney, Brazil's Neymar, and a dozen others-was built around an intense, provocative World Cup story line of?taking?risks?to gain the glory of succeeding against rival teams and nations.

In one Risk Everything video-"Winner Stays"-two teams of young men faced off on a local soccer field for a pickup game, pretending to be (then turning into) the superstars. The scene transformed into a legendary bout on a global stage. As the video ended, a young boy stepped in for Ronaldo and under immense pressure scored the winning goal. According to one analyst, the Risk Everything videos were "the perfect blend of product placement, provocative storytelling, and real-time marketing." Although the videos were filled with Nike swooshes, products, and stars, highly engaged viewers hardly realized that they were consuming ad content.

By the end of the final World Cup match, the Risk Everything videos had produced 372 million views, 22 million engagements (Likes, comments, shares), and 650,000 uses of #riskeverything. Nike reigned as the "most-viewed brand" of the World Cup in terms of online video, trouncing rival adidas. In fact, Nike's online views accounted for an incredible one-half of all the views attributed to the event's 97 World Cup marketing campaigns-and Nike wasn't even an official sponsor. Along with the Risk Everything videos, Nike ran a full array of traditional television, print, radio, cinema, and gaming advertising. Taken as a whole, across all media, the Risk Everything campaign generated more than 6 billion impressions in 35 countries. Now that's customer engagement.

Nike has also created customer value and brand community through groundbreaking?mobile?apps?and technologies. For example, its Nike+ apps have helped Nike become a part of the daily fitness routines of millions of customers around the world. Whether your activity is running, jumping, baseball, skating, dancing, stacking sports cups, or chasing chickens, you can use the Nike+ family of apps to "unlock your potential.” Nike+ apps let everyday athletes design their workouts, access coaching and training tools, track their personal progress, get extra motivation on the go, and share and compare their experiences across sports and locations with friends and others in the Nike community. Nike+ has engaged a huge global brand community, with more than 28 million registered users and a goal of 100 million users.

Thus, Nike delivers customer value well beyond the products it makes. It has built a deep kinship and sense of community with and between the Nike brand and its customers. Whether it's through local running clubs, a performance-tracking app, primetime TV ads, videos, or other content at any of its dozens of brand websites and social media pages, the Nike brand has become a valued part of customers' lives and times.

As a result, Nike remains the world's largest sports apparel company, an impressive 44 percent larger than rival adidas. It captures an even more impressive 62 percent of the U.S. sports footwear market versus number-two Skechers at only 5 percent and adidas at 4.6 percent. During the past decade, even as a sometimes-shaky economy left many sports footwear and apparel rivals gasping for breath, Nike's global sales and income have sprinted ahead by more than double.

"Connecting used to be, 'Here's some product, and here's some advertising. We hope you like it,"" notes Nike's CEO. "Connecting today is a dialogue." Says Nike's chief marketing officer, "The engagement levels we have received...drive huge momentum for our brand. This is just the beginning of how we will connect with and inspire athletes around the world." Concludes the CEO, "at Nike, there is no?finish?line."

Today's successful companies have one thing in common: Like Nike, they are strongly customer focused and heavily committed to marketing. These companies share a passion for satisfying customer needs in well-defined target markets. They motivate everyone in the organization to help build lasting customer relationships based on creating value.

Customer relationships and value are especially important today. Facing dramatic technological advances and deep economic, social, and environmental challenges, today's customers are reassessing how they engage with brands. New digital, mobile, and social media developments have revolutionized how consumers shop and interact, in turn calling for new marketing strategies and tactics. It's now more important than ever to build strong customer engagement, relationships, and advocacy based on real and enduring customer value.