Nike’s roots go back to a company called Blue Ribbon Sports
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nike shoes australia online Nike’s roots go back to a company called Blue Ribbon Sports, which Knight, a former runner at the University of Oregon, and Bill Bowerman, Knight’s former track coach, created in 1962. Blue Ribbon Sports started out distributing running shoes for a Japanese company, then shifted to designing its own shoes and outsourcing them from Asia. Blue Ribbon Sports’s performance-oriented product innovations and mastery of low-cost production translated into shoes athletes wanted to wear and could afford. Knight and Bowerman’s track connections got the shoes onto the feet of real runners. And then jogging emerged as a new national pastime.
nike shoes australia sale Jon Anderson had won the Boston Marathon wearing Nike shoes, Jimmy Conners had won Wimbledon and the U.S. Open wearing Nike shoes, Henry Rono had set four track and field records in Nikes, and members of the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers basketball teams were wearing them. Sales and profits were doubling every year. Then in the mid-1980s, Nike lost its footing, and the company was forced to make a subtle but important shift. Instead of putting the product on center stage, it put the consumer in the spotlight and the brand under a microscope—in short, it learned to be marketing oriented.
nike shoes australia cheap Here Phil Knight explains how Nike discovered the importance of marketing and what difference that discovery has made. This interview was conducted at Nike, Inc.’s Beaverton, Oregon offices by HBR associate editor Geraldine E. Willigan. Nike transformed the athletic shoe industry with technological innovations, but today many people know the company by its flashy ads and sports celebrities. Is Nike a technology company or a marketing company? I’d answer that question very differently today than I would have ten years ago. For years, we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product.
nike shoes australia womens But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool. What I mean is that marketing knits the whole organization together. The design elements and functional characteristics of the product itself are just part of the overall marketing process. Our success. In the early days, anybody with a glue pot and a pair of scissors could get into the shoe business, so the way to stay ahead was through product innovation. We happened to be great at it. Bill Bowerman, my former track coach at the University of Oregon.