Earlier in my career, I did advertising for New Balance, and Nike to me was the big, bad enemy. Sure, it was the dominant brand in the athletic footwear category, had the slickest, most impressive, most crowded booths every year at the National Shoe Show and could basically buy athletes at will. (American runner Steve Prefontaine – “Pre” – was one of the first big-name athletes to ink a deal, receiving a $5,000 stipend in 1973 so he could stop bartending and concentrate solely on running.)
But I never thought their footwear was as well made or technologically advanced as NB’s. And while I grudgingly admired Nike’s advertising, I didn’t have a particularly high opinion of the company itself.
In my dismissiveness, I thought Nike was another example of a mass-market company that didn’t stack up to a smaller, more exclusive competitor. It wasn’t exactly IBM versus Apple, but in my mind, it was something like that.
Recently, though, I read Phil Knight’s fascinating, heartfelt autobiography, Shoe Dog, and candidly, I found myself seriously rethinking my point of view about Nike.
There’s no doubt about it – this is one of the great success stories in contemporary American business. More than that, it’s a tribute to one man’s unwillingness to settle. Talk about just doing it.
A passionate evangelizer for the transcendence of sports, Knight was determined to create a company whose brand essence epitomized that concept. He founded its precursor company, Blue Ribbon Sports, in 1964 based on a thesis he wrote during his MBA program at Stanford Business School. Any number of things along the way to Nikedom could have derailed his ambitions – a bad economy, inadequate funding, resistant bankers, distribution challenges and, most especially, lack of cooperation from Onitsuka, the Japanese company that manufactured Tiger running shoes, which were Blue Ribbon’s sole product. But Phil Knight was a man on a mission. Long before “There is no finish line” became a popular Nike ad, it was his personal mantra.
As I think about strong brands, it’s interesting to me how often they are born of the passions of one exceptional leader. Think Steve Jobs, think Howard Schultz, think Mickey Drexler, think Elon Musk. In advertising, think Bill Bernbach and David Ogilvy. And most definitely, think Phil Knight.
There may be no more authentic brands than those founded or driven by strong leaders whose personal vision and corporate mission statement are essentially one and the same. That kind of passion is contagious, inspiring and differentiating. People who are part of companies like that know why they get up and go to work every day. It’s why Phil Knight was able to attract a group of talented individuals to a company that often could barely pay its bills.
About Nike, I stand corrected.
