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Selling an emotion more than a product

Co-founder Phil Knight has said, 'Ultimately, we wanted Nike to be the world's best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don't end up making wingtips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.' Nike is about bringing inspiration and innovation to every athlete. For Nike, it's clear that ‘If you have a body, you're an athlete.' Therefore, Nike caters to all athletes, making no distinction anymore between pro and amateur. Nike motivates people of diverse backgrounds and lifestyles to chase after their dreams and discover their maximum potential. Which is why Nike decided to place the customer in the centre court of the brand. Recognising the emotional aspect of their business, and using the latest tech to enhance those feelings, Nike decided to integrate digital marketing into their entire operations, thus placing the customer at the centre of the brand and communication.

TELLING STORIES, NOT PRODUCTS

Apart from promoting ease of use and innovation, Nike always empowers and motivates consumers in their campaigns. Nike's higher purpose is helping their consumers become better athletes to stay healthy and fit.

Through this benefit-driven goal, they communicate, make sales, and have become one of the most loved top-10 brands. With e-commerce now becoming the main focus of Nike's consumer strategy, all communication is also shifting towards a digital approach, with everything designed for virality. With a powerful #message, appealing to a social vibe and consisting of a mix of stories and shared across Nike's different platforms and networks.

Outcome Driven

Such outcome-based marketing shows the user benefits of a product's features rather than directly advocating the function or features. It promotes the application factor of the product, so consumers understand how the product will help them grow. Combined with a powerful message relayed through an impactful storyline.

Whether the campaign is 'What are girls made of', 'Find your greatness' or 'Dream crazy', Nike always spotlights self-limiting beliefs that bring us down. When you think, 'I can't do it,' Nike assures, 'Just do it.'

All Users Are Influencers

Marketing with real people and authenticity has proved one of the more-effective tactics of the socialmedia era, and Nike sees these groups

VIDEO: https://www.nike.com/nl/en/launch/t/outside-the-box-sneakerhead-story as a means to stoke engagement among its hundreds of millions of more casual, styleseeking shoppers. Nike targets smaller communities by using fewer professional models and, instead, featuring more real Nike customers who have joined its Nike ID membership programme.

Marketing Is A Conversation

Nike's strategy is based on running multiple social accounts. This way, the brand is able to target the audiences of different social campfires (e.g., with interests such as football, basketball, yoga, etc.). In these socalled tribes, classically 20% of a community are leaders, 80% are followers. But in Nike's view, the latest generation of social media is less about anonymous followers (like Facebook) and far more about smaller pods with deeper engagement (such as TikTok, Snapchat or Instagram).

The Nike approach is that everybody can be an influencer in their own microenvironment. Because you want to showoff a new product, have a story to share, or experienced something special. Nike can trigger such an experience by offering all people the opportunity to unlock special gifts or access exclusive drops. Nike leads by letting users tell their own stories, by leveraging all kinds of user-generated content, and also by partaking and engaging in customer conversations.

Digital Connection To Get Authentic Feedback

Nike has a bunch of mobile apps, including Run Club, Training Club, Nike+ and its shopping-centric retail app, which is simply called Nike. Most of these apps are free, but they also provide crucial data and insights into the desires of the digital consumer. These features aren't just about marketing. Nike uses them to collect data: it can see which photos members linger on, which sneakers or clothing items they zoom in on, and what they skip over. The data lets Nike serve them with products they're more likely to want and, of course, to buy. It can also use the data when creating new products. A very effective strategy to figure out how to serve customers better. This social listening further allows Nike to create targeted campaigns and products directly powered by social conversations with customers.