Top Marketing Lessons from Nike – Understand your core customer

Year 1992 was a historical year in Nike’s history, it laid the foundation to its journey towards excellence. Phil Knight was the architecture of these changes. He laid the foundation to some of the greatest principles of ‘High –Performance marketing”. To this day, Nike stays true to these principles.

Though these are 11 principles in total, but we will discuss top three in this part, rest in the next few parts. The 11 principles are:

1. Understand your core customer
2. Create a pyramid customer base
3. Do your market research
4. Define your identity and messaging
5. Focus entirely on that and cut out bias
6. Create sub-brands under the umbrella of your brand
7. Creating emotional ties
8. Take chances and learn from them
9. This all works if you have a good product
10. Work with influences because people already know and trust them
11. Build long term relationships with influencers to build long-term relationships with consumer.

1. Understand your core customer: In their initial year’s Nike was known as a running shoe company. Most of their employees were runners and this helped them understand their customers very well. Later on, when they diversified into other sports, they did the same. Nike would go to the top players of that sport and would do everything possible to understand what they needed from a tech and design standpoint & then the engineers would create a product that would give the athletes what they needed both functionally and aesthetically.
2. Create a Pyramid customer Base: The first step was to create “Core Customers” ie the athletes.      Phil Knight believed in the principle “if we get the people at the top, we’ll get the others because they’ll know that the shoe can perform.”  The question is who made the pyramid customer base? The pyramid top was made by athletes, mid-portion was made up by weekend warriors ie the people who worked out on weekends. At the bottom were all those wore athletic shoes. The key to their success was not communicating with the pyramid top but designing the communication in such a way that they connected well with the customers at the bottom. This helped them understand the entire pyramid.
3. Do your market research: Just like Nike did everything to understand their core customers, they did the same for the everyday Joe (common man). Knight says, “To understand the rest of the pyramid, we do a lot of work at the grass-roots level.” They would:
   •  Go to amateur sport events
   • Hit the gyms
   • Visit tennis courts
   • Attend local clubs, because they wanted their product to have the same functionality for “Michael Jordan or Joe (common) American Public.”

Lesson learned – stay connected to the roots, keep your ears to the ground, you can never fail.

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