Question 3 Things Nike should watch for

The main issue Nike should focus on is choosing right athletes to promote. Once they pick someone with vague background, the company’s reputation might be tainted.

Recommendations

Question 4 Recommendations to senior marketing executives

Considering Nike’s main vulnerabilities, possible recommendations might be following:

· The company should concentrate on making ads focused on a world customer instead of just an American customer. It would help reducing costs on marketing and advertising. Moreover, it can rally Nike fans all around the world and create the community.

· Nike should choose athletes properly. The company needs to examine backgrounds of those people thoroughly. Also, to protect the brand from possible risks, Nike could enter into a contract with their athletes. The contract may provide penalties for misbehavior.

· The brand should show their efforts in going green. The world community is concerned about climate changes. If Nike shows deep understanding of this problem and offers solutions, it may have a positive impact on customers’ attitude.

Question 5 What to do with Nike’s marketing

There are a few possible ways to improve Nike’s marketing strategy.

1. Now the company is focused on runners and other athletes entirely. However, regular non-sports customers want to wear high-quality and well-designed clothes and shoes too. Nike can create a new casual clothing line to increase profit.

2. Currently, Nike mostly promotes the US athletes even in non-US ads. Despite the fact such people are famous worldwide, it would be better to sometimes invite local sportsmen.

3. Nike is already extremely good in creating strong and meaningful social ads. For example, at the beginning of 2017 the company launched the Equality campaign (https://www.nike.com/us/en_us/c/go/equality). Nike Russia created a powerful ad supporting girls in sport (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nike-russia-girls-ad_us_58c01c08e4b0ed718268babe). The only thing Nike can do is to keep moving in this direction.

Conclusion

This case study is a perfect example of Nike’s marketing strategy. The company widely uses influencers such as famous people and athletes to promote the production of the brand. Nike has a remarkable ability to adapt their existing marketing strategy to European, Asian and South American style of advertising. As a result, today Nike is one of the biggest athletic manufacturer in the world. In 2014, their revenues exceeded $27 billion, and the global market share reached 31 percent.

References

Kotler, P., & Keller, K. L. (2016). Marketing management. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Swant, M. (2016). Twitter Says Users Now Trust Influencers Nearly as Much as Their Friends [Article]. Retrieved from http://www.adweek.com/digital/twitter-says-users-now-trust-influencers-nearly-much-their-friends-171367/