Nike’s Marketing Strategies & The Impact of Technology
Nike’s Marketing Strategies
Separate Facebook Pages for Product Categories
Like most global brands, Nike has separate Facebook pages for each of its product categories. This includes golf, snowboarding, and FuelBand, as well as two football pages – one for the American version of the sport and one for the version everyone else in the world plays.
Most of the dedicated sports pages are updated on a daily basis with videos or images, while the corporate page is updated about once a week.
YouTube Medium
Hero, Hub, Hygiene Strategy
This holistic “hero, hub, hygiene” strategy has helped Nike Football grow its YouTube channel to over 1.8 million YouTube subscribers, making it the sixth most subscribed and ninth most viewed brand on the platform.
Hero Content
As mentioned earlier, Nike Football’s most prominent piece of “Hero” content comes in the form of their hugely successful (and unofficial) World Cup film, “Winner Stays”. It was the crux of Nike’s #riskeverything campaign which coincided with the World Cup. The film featured a “who’s who” of superstar Nike-sponsored athletes.
Hub Content
To incentivize fans and subscribers to keep coming back to the channel, Nike Football has also been creating “hub” content. Nike Football’s most recent implementation of this strategy comes in the form of its animated #AskZlatan series.
Hub content is best described as videos that are released regularly and are “meant to entertain and keep an audience coming back”, and the #AskZlatan series does just that.
Focused on entertaining subscribers, the #AskZlatan ‘hub’ content provides the existing community a reason to keep coming back.
Hygiene Content
Hero content drives mass awareness, hub content engages the existing community, and hygiene videos act as hooks to pull viewers into the channel – something Nike Football does very well with its “Nike Academy” series. The Nike Academy videos are primarily “how-to” and training videos to help football players looking to improve their skills. Its content is directly related to the brand and the consumer.
Non-Digital Still Works
Looking at return on investment, the contribution to KPI is still higher. TV provides rich visual coverage.
Traditional marketing utilizes strategies like direct sales, TV, radio, mail, print advertising (like magazines, coupon books, billboards, etc.) and printed promotional materials like catalogs or brochures (often referred to as collateral).
Pros of Traditional Marketing
Traditional methods may be the only means of reaching your particular group of consumers. Traditional marketing. There is definitely a time and place when this type of direct selling is the most effective way to market a product or service. Tangibility. Traditional marketing offers hard copy material. There is something to be said about handing a consumer some tangible printed material they can flip through at their leisure.
Integrated Marketing
Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) is the application of consistent brand messaging across both traditional and non-traditional marketing channels and using different promotional methods to reinforce each other.
Why is it Important?
With a broad range of promotional tools available, integration becomes important, particularly because of growing complexity arising from the many communication types:
- Many brand contact points customers can have
- More than one audience being targeted
- More than one message
- A range of creative content
- Fragmented media behavior, so brands have to communicate in broader ways
- Target audiences being geographically diverse
- B2B and B2C messaging needs to be consistent
Creative Consistency
By repeating the headlines, key phrases, and images in each communication, you ensure that prospects and customers receive consistent messages each time they see one of the elements of the campaign.
Customer Preference
An integrated campaign helps you provide customers with information in the format they prefer. Consumers and business customers can specify if they want to receive product information via email, direct mail, text message, or telephone. Integration ensures they receive the same information in all communications.
A business using a cross-media strategy with multiple mediums is generally more effective. Multiple exposures create higher credibility, and there’s a synergistic effect when using multiple media.
Integration of creative materials, such as message execution and integration of creative ideas across media. Various communication media should be consistent with their messages.
Communication Integration
GoPro uses the theme “Be a HERO” to connect with its target audience in a meaningful way. Using brand-related sponsorships and endorsements, outdoor ads, SEO, web, and heavy social media, GoPro integrates all of their marketing efforts with plenty of user-generated content.
GoPro users can submit their original videos or photos to win Video or Photo of the Day on GoPro’s social media channels. The brand was able to score one of the top ads of the year by using a firefighter’s original GoPro video, proving that when you have a strong brand message, even user-generated content will represent your campaign and make it successful.
Television advertising allows local, national, and international communication. It’s a great visual medium that allows targeting. But it’s expensive and interruptive versus social channels, which provide different advertising opportunities. For example, Pinterest is a female-dominated platform and provides communication opportunities particularly for females.
How Technology Impacted Human Behavior
- Our lives are increasingly being conducted in the digital realm. Technology has become a big part of the way we live, e.g., the number of social media users is doubling at an increasing speed. 2) It has made human behavior shift towards impatience and an instant access mindset. 1) Waiting in a line at the grocery store becomes unbearable with online payment options. 3) Technology has also made us spoiled and now more reliant on technologies, e.g., depending heavily on technologies leading to laziness and letting technologies do even the most simple tasks. 4) The way we communicate, e.g., it’s the mobile era with significant shifts from fixed-line phones to cell phones to social media platforms for communication. 5) Technology has made humans more productive, especially employees, who are more confident and empowered by the faith they have in their technology. Follow-up emails, technology empowers and makes people more productive, e.g., employees with cloud storage are empowered by the faith they have in their technology. Be it high-value sales or sending basic follow-up emails, technology empowers and makes people more productive. 6) Social acceptance and creating happiness and unhappiness have also been now based on digital interactions and technologies, such as gaming, etc., and unfriending and hateful comments on social media and other digital platforms.