Domestic Brand Clothing Enterprises Should Learn From Nike'S Marketing Methods

　 　 Many people will think that Nike and Adidas are two sports brands in the global market, but in fact, the global sales of Nike have always been 1.5 times that of Adidas. The brand value of Nike is about equal to three Adidas. Nike even has a market share of 96% in the basketball shoe industry in the United States.

The sales volume of Nike is 1.5 times that of Adidas

　 　 What's more, Nike has a strong influence on all major social media platforms. In 2019, the number of twitter fans ranked 11th among brand accounts, and this year, with 1.68 billion fans, it ranked first in instagram brand accounts.
　 　 So, how did Nike gain such social media influence? Why does Nike work so hard on social media platforms? Does social media attention help actual sales? In this issue, let's feel Nike out to sea

　 　01

Our generation first knew the brand of Nike through TV advertising.

However, Nike has noticed that over time, the payoff from spending a lot of money on TV advertising in prime time is getting less and less. This is because Nike's main audience is young people aged 15-25, but this generation's channels of receiving information are not large-scale, one-way, top-down traditional media, but various online platforms.

As a result, in order to keep up with the main consumer groups, Nike realized that its marketing methods also need to follow this generation and make changes. So Nike reduced its advertising spending on traditional media by 40% from 2010 to 2012, but increased its overall marketing budget by $2.4 billion, and used the extra part on social media platforms.

In the past, every year in the world cup, sports brands would spend a lot of money to buy advertising time in seconds. In the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, Nike chose to use online channels for advertising.

They invited more than a dozen stars to make a micro film with the theme of "writing the future". The participants included Real Madrid's top scorer Ronaldo, "Warcraft" Drogba, Italian defensive core Cannavaro and Barcelona legendary midfield Iniesta, etc.

After satisfying the fans' appetite, Nike put the premiere of the micro film on its official website, and then cooperated with Facebook, youtube and even Tencent QQ to launch the advertising video to fans all over the world through the global partners of these three online media.

In the first week of its launch, the ad received 8 million exposures, and later caused viral transmission on the whole platform, with a total of 50 million views. During the world cup, Nike's Facebook account number rapidly increased from 1.1 million to 4.8 million, making it the most frequently forwarded brand of the year.

　 　02

However, this is only the first step towards social media marketing for Nike, and the next operation can truly reflect Nike's understanding of social media marketing.

As mentioned above, the biggest difference between traditional media such as television and new media is the flow of information. New media marketing focuses on the two-way interaction between brands and consumers. This time, Nike also has a marketing highlight during the world cup in South Africa, which is to let consumers participate in marketing.

In Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa, Nike chose the fourth tallest building in the area and built a 30 storey billboard. Every night, it selects 100 items of content and pictures sent by users to broadcast in turn. Users can send what they want to say to Nike officials through Facebook, twitter and even Tencent QQ, and also put pictures of their favorite stars on it, Let your love bean overlook South Africa.

As soon as the event was launched, it received a large number of fans' participation, and in less than a month, 32 million people watched it. According to a survey by Nielsen, a consulting firm, Adidas, which has spent millions more than $1 billion to become an official sponsor, Nike has gained more than twice the popularity of the world cup, and finally surpassed Adidas in the sales of football supplies.

In addition to attracting consumers through its star studded lineup and novel forms, Nike's strength lies in empathy. The women's World Cup in 2019 is a good example. In this competition, Nike sponsored 14 teams and publicized its sponsored players before the game started.

For example, during that time, all the open screen ads of instagram were female players wearing Nike jerseys, and 90% of the posts on Nike account were related to women's football. Therefore, although women's matches were generally not so popular, when the women's football World Cup started, all the audience had already established their awareness of the players.

Nike post during women's World Cup

At the end of the day, when the American girls won the final, Nike released a video advertisement that had been prepared for a long time, in which the American team players held together to celebrate the victory, which brought the mood to a climax.

Although the theme of Nike's advertising will always be inspirational chicken soup, with the scene at that time, the ad has achieved amazing results. It has watched nearly 5 million times on youtube and more than 20 million likes on twitter. The series of ads have also set a record, breaking the monopoly of men's sports.

In addition to the public advertisements mentioned above, 70% of Nike's advertisements on social media are "darkpost". Hidden Posts refer to the social media advertisements that are not displayed in the account homepage and are only sent to specific audiences.

Through the information given by big data, Nike can push different advertisements for each category of people. The protagonist of the advertisement is no longer a popular star who often appears in front of the public, but can accurately touch the new faces of this group of people. For example, once, it launched a strong black female shot putter.

Facts have proved that this kind of highly targeted advertising can transform sales more effectively than public advertising. After all, after all, it can grasp the pain points and itching points of specific groups after targeting at small market segments.

　 　03

Of course, in addition to the above only big brands can do money burning marketing, Nike has also done both grounded and creative zero cost advertising.

In 2013, Nike created a platform called nikephotoid on INS. Users can upload their ins photos to the platform. The platform automatically extracts several main colors from the photos and generates a corresponding Nike shoe. If you like the style of the shoes, users can also jump directly to the Nike online store to chop their hands.

In the first week of the event, Nike produced 100000 pairs of shoes. Since each photo was carefully selected by users, each shoe looked unique and exclusive. In the end, as many as 8% of participants bought the shoes.

By the end of 2013, the number of users of nikephoto reached 15 million, bringing Nike $100 million in revenue. However, the whole event did not spend a cent of promotion fee, and it was all spontaneous spread by instagram users.

The sports shoes generated by ikephoto ID

Of course, no matter how high the sales volume is during the large-scale marketing activities, after all, it is only the short-term pulse growth, and the long-term stable sales volume is the ultimate pursuit of consumer brands. In this regard, how does Nike play the social media platform as a tool with goods?

In order to win the favor of young consumers, Nike actively interacts with a large number of fans on the major social media platforms every day, and the content of the post is still far from the heart.

For example, a user on Facebook once asked Nike who was playing golf and who was wearing what shoes one day. He did not say which day, what kind of shoes they looked like, and they were not necessarily nike shoes.

Encounter this kind of netizen, a lot of people may regard him as to find fault, but Nike has a very patient reply, he said "send a photo to see", and immediately found the shoes after the younger brother's reply, and also attached a link to the same model.

The interaction between Nike and fans

　 　04

So much has been said about Nike's practice, in fact, every action behind it has its specific goal.

In 1898, American advertising pioneer Elmo Reeves put forward a marketing model called Aida model, which divided the process from contact with external information to the completion of purchase behavior into four steps: attention, interest, desire and action.

The AIDA model

The marketing behavior of Nike introduced by us corresponds to these steps one by one. For any consumer brand, the first step to reach a purchase is to let users know that you exist, so Nike has won online attention with its elaborate World Cup movies to match the information receiving habits of core users.

After gaining the user's attention, the brand needs to increase the interest of potential customers, so next, Nike used the high-rise buildings in South Africa to create a large-scale interactive marketing to enhance the relationship between consumers and themselves.

Next, the brand needs to turn interest into desire, that is, from "I like" to "I want". In this step, Nike not only uses brand advertising with strong values to occupy consumers' minds, but also relies on creative activities like nikephoto to directly stimulate the desire to buy.

Finally, it is the ultimate goal of all the pre steps, that is, the purchase behavior. Nike uses the social media platform to ask and answer questions and convenient one button jump links to convey clear reasons and ways to cut hands and finally complete the transformation.

　　 reference material:

[1] what can we learn from Nike's $39 marketing strategy

[2] Nike marketing strategy: a guide to selling benefits rather than products

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