When Nike got it wrong........

I am part of new age media company and good chunk of our time is dedicated to making media plans in the most attractive and well rationalized formats. We all work very hard to meet the media plan deadlines and have made adjustments to the tasks on hand. 

I had an interesting exchange with our team today morning over a simple but slightly different requirement for a media plan and proposal. To meet the deadline or to catch up with the urgency order, the media team took an easy route of re-purposing one of the earlier plans, changed the name, title and the plan page without looking at the implications. As a result, the retail store plan became a hospital visit digital proposal in two minutes. The components and execution strategy were left as it is.  The over worked team--or just people in general including me has a habit of short cuts that can have major implications. 

This reminded me of the famous and very costly slip by TEAM NIKE, when they let Stephen Curry slip through its fingers to land with their competitor Under Armour.

When the sensation Curry entered the NBA, he signed a modest endorsement deal with Nike which is usual as most of the significant players from the first three rounds of draft do. The renewal of that deal is determined based on their performance, on and off court character. So at the end of the 2013 season, Curry's contract with Nike was up for renewal.

And here's what happened when Nike tried to convince Curry to re-up, as per ESPN:

"The pitch meeting, according to Steph's father, Dell, who was present, kicked off with one Nike official accidentally addressing Stephen as 'Steph-on,', 'I heard some people pronounce his name wrong before,' says Dell Curry. 'I wasn't surprised. I was surprised that I didn't get a correction.' It got worse from there. A PowerPoint slide featured rival then OKC star Kevin Durant's name, presumably left on by accident, and presumably residue from re-purposed materials. 'I stopped paying attention after that,' Dell says. Though Dell resolved to 'keep a pokerface, throughout the entirety of the pitch, the decision to leave Nike was in the works.'" And it happened.

And this did have major implications for NIKE. Looking at the numbers again to see what NIKE lost that year, that is just from one major athlete’s endorsement deal. The sales of Curry's signature basketball shoe were up 350 percent since the start of that year, making them higher than the sales of any Nike signature shoe except Jordan's. 

To add salt to the wound, the Morgan Stanley analyst Jay Sole, assessing Under Armour's future prospects, said:

"UA's total basketball business is probably double the following year (in terms of retail sales), and even its non-Curry styles have grown at a super-high rate. The growth could be a result of UA taking share by under-pricing its shoes. Or it could be a tipping point signaling the end of Nike's basketball dominance. That's a difference of $14 billion, much of it attributable to Curry's popularity and his impact on the overall Under Armour brand.

I know what you're thinking: "Interesting; but what does that have to do with me?" If you are part of a massive company like Nike, or any other organization think again.

Every task needs that much care, even if you reuse, do it with care and purpose. Be it the same category genre, treat it as special. 

Well, we got the plan changed before sharing it with the client and it took time. Phew…………….