Content area
Full text
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This paper seeks to outline the brand marketing strategies used by Nike to maintain its global competitiveness. Nike appears to operate with two main objectives: to expand geographically and through deeper market penetration, and to build profitable consumer-brand relations. The former is achieved in part through successful brand portfolio management and subsequent marketing tactics. The latter is realized in part through raising brand recall and relevancy, which will result in brand esteem. In so doing, Nike combines the benefits of retaining old customers and acquiring new ones, all the while seeking out any possible means of cost savings.
Keywords: Brand Strategy, Brand Portfolio Management
THE STORY OF NIKE'S MARKETING SUCCESS
Business entities seek success in the form of sales, profit, and market share. Their order of importance depends on the situation, but invariably the three are related: sales lead to market share, market share leads to sales, and both can impact profit (Buzzell et al., 1975; Syzmanski et al., 1993). From a strategic marketing perspective, Nike seeks to increase sales, profits, and market share in a unique manner illustrated in Figure 1.
Nike finds new customers directly through geographic expansion and continued market penetration, both of which inherently contribute to increases in sales and profits. It should be noted that both expansion objectives enjoy a mutualistic relationship in that geographic expansion leads to more consumer relationships, and stronger relationships lead to word of mouth expansion within extant markets (Berger & Shwartz, 2011). Nike utilizes a standardized global marketing strategy in which it communicates a single identity complete with a single set of products; this is successfully facilitated via specific tactics such as endorsements and brand portfolio expansion which shall be explained in depth later. The introduction of a brand into a new geographic region inherently expands potential sales, global market share, and if the operation is managed efficiently, profits (Buzzell et al., 1975; Syzmanski et al., 1993).
Nike's market penetration and geographic expansion strategy are predicated upon building consumer-based brand equity (CBBE) and utilizing specific tactics to diffuse it across unreached demographic and psychographic sets. CBBE is built exclusively through recall, relevance, and esteem (Keller 1993). The reason behind this hyper focus on three particular brand aspects is because brands which perform...