Global Marketing

Global marketing isn't new to the Nike franchise. Nike began as a partner to a Japanese shoe distributor and they haven't lost their touch to the outside world since. The most recent change in the global market is the rapid growth of interactive and mobile marketing. Nike has focused their efforts on the mobile aspect which now offers customers the capability of customizing their own shoe and purchasing them all on their cellphone. Another recent marketing strategy was implemented globally through the mobile market. Bluetooth enabled billboards that would automatically send a message to people walking past telling them to run to the nearest Nike store. A virtual stopwatch would start upon reading the message and the fastest time each day would receive a free pair of shoes. Across three cities in three weeks there was 250,000 Bluetooth messages sent, 15,000 participants, and 63 pairs of Nike shoes were awarded.

Global Vision

Nike is the largest designer, marketer, and distributor of authentic athletic footwear in the world. Nike is most renowned globally for their involvement in well-known sporting events. Now Nike has a new project called the Nike+ Human Race which is hosted in twenty four different cities around the world including New York City, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Rome, Singapore, Paris, Milan, Seoul, London, Bangalore among others. The Nike+Human Race was created with a purpose to unite the runner lovers farther than just their city boarders and to experience that joy with people all over the world. Last year Nike+ Human Race became the largest multi-city running event in history with nearly 780,000 participants.

Ethics

Ethics became a main concern for Nike in the late 1990's due to the negative media attention on child labor in Asian, Latin, and other global subcontractors that employed children even younger than 10 years old. In the past 10 years Nike has organized a global public relations campaign in attempt to turn around their reputation. Presently, each manufacturer follows strict employee guidelines including age regulations and required work permits. Nike has redeemed themselves from the child labour issue but now faces criticism in terms of work conditions in countries other than America. In Indonesia, nearly a third of the workers experienced verbal abuse. Currently, Nike is working with Global Alliance to allow more favorable work conditions and create an equal workforce throughout the world. All in all, Nike is taking a step in the right direction and corporate social responsibility influences their decisions more and more each day.

Go Green

Nike, along with other corporate companies have made an attempt to reduce their carbon footprint in reaction to drastic climate change. Nike has made a conscious effort to incorporate sustainability into their operations and have lowered greenhouse gas emissions. Nike has focused their efforts on maintaining the Brazilian rainforests due to the high volume of Brazilian leather imported for Nike products. The new policy allows the entire supply route to be monitored and ensures that the rainforests are kept safe throughout the operation.

Time of Change

Parker has outlined his plan in order to adapt to the fast changing digitally savvy consumer. He plans to reshape the managment structure and add one hundred new company stores worldwide in the next three years. "We're fundamentally changing the way we organize the company," Parker says. Although Parker's plan seems ambitious, some analysts doubt that he could actually meet his goal of more than a nine percent increase in sales each year for the next five years. Analysts have projected that it would be near impossible to accomplish this goal with out turning around the slumping sales in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. basketball market, which acounts for nearly 3.5 billiion dollars in the market segment.

New CEO in town

Nike has never been known for their conservative ways but no one expected the new CEO, Mark Parker, to begin his strageic planning so aggressivley. Parker made a statement when he brought fourth his ambitous plan that would increase revenues by eight billion dollars in the next five years. Parker showed the doubters that he meant business when he offered German National Soccer Federation 778 million dollars in order for Nike to sponcer it's national team for the next ten years. The offer brought controversy between the two sports rivals, Nike and Adidas, because Adidas has been the the longtime sponcer for the German team.

Current status

Nike has now expanded its line into other sports throughout the world. Nike still holds the largest market share in the United States and global despite the fact that Adidas and Reebok merged in 2005. Recently Nike has been forced to offer sales as high as 50% in responce to a decrease in market share. Phil Knight along with other senior managers have planned to cut down own staff and shut down facilities world wide. It seems Nike isn't the only company to make long term changes in order to try and ensure their safety from the hard economic times.

where it all started

Originally, Nike was known as Blue Ribbon Sports concentrated solely on shoes that were sold out of co-creater Phil Knight's trunk before and after his track meets. The company started out as a distributor for a Japanese shoe maker named Onitsuka Tiger. In 1966 Blue Ribbon Sports opened up their first retail store in Santa Monica, California. The profits grew rapidly and the relationship between BRS and Onitsula Tiger grew farther apart. in 1971 the two business partners went their different ways and Nike planned to launch their own shoe bearing the swoosh logo. The first shoe BRS sold with the new logo was a soccer shoe named "Nike".