For 50 years Nike has pioneered and extended the territory of sports and fitness marketing. Wieden+Kennedy has been the lead agency on that journey, delivering an unsurpassed stream of groundbreaking work. Back in 1992, co-founder Dan Wieden set down his insights on the output past and future with this seminal article in the Harvard Business Review.
The people at Nike taught my partner, David Kennedy, and me how to advertise — and how not to advertise. Back in 1980, when David and I first started to work on the account, Nike made it very clear that they hated advertising. They had developed close relationships with athletes, and they didn’t want to talk to them in any phony or manipulative way. They were obsessed with authenticity, in terms of both the product and the communication. And they had a sense of what was cool.
Those attitudes have guided all of Nike’s advertising. We try to make honest contact with the consumer, to share something that is very hip and very inside. We don’t translate the inside jokes because we figure it’s OK if the people who are faddish don’t understand. Either you get it or you don’t. It’s more important for us to be true to the athletes by talking to them in a way that respects their intelligence, time, and knowledge of sports.
This approach to advertising seems to be in synch with the times, and I think that’s why people respond to Nike ads. Products and services today have to have value and live up to their promise, but a spec sheet approach to marketing won’t sell anything. As the world gets more dehumanizing, people want the trust and familiarity of a long-standing relationship. Building that relationship requires a brand with a personality and advertising.
Personality is the difference between the surrogate monkey parent and the real thing: the surrogate might have the nutriment, but everything else is missing, and the relationship never forms. In the business world, brand-building creates the personality that allows people to bond. The Nike brand, for instance, is very complex. Sometimes it’s humorous, other times it’s very serious — but it’s always as if it were coming from the same person.
Advertising creates the environment for the relationship. To me, it takes the place of the human contact we once had as consumers. In the beginning, people had relationships with the shopkeeper, and any advertising simply supplemented that relationship. Today things are so complex that advertising needs to embody that relationship by making contact in more than a superficial way.
The process of creating brands and relationships is also the process by which you create the values our culture operates on, so it has a huge ethical component. The ethical dimension makes our work seem like much more than the movement of goods and services. And it can be scary. I remember sitting here one night with campaigns spread out all over the place getting ready to present to Nike the next morning. I felt we needed to tie things together, so I said, “Ok, I’ll just do it.” That became “Just Do It,” a slogan that spread all over the world. I realized then what a big, big stage this is and how important it is to be responsible for what goes on here.
I don’t mean to suggest that this is a noncontroversial agency. I don’t feel it’s our job to produce stuff that doesn’t upset people. Being provocative is ultimately more important than being pleasant. But you have to know what you’re doing when you walk into the room with broad swords.
Our awareness of the ethical issues is also a factor in the positive response to Nike ads. The general public can sense when something is destructive or at least not very positive. In fact, I think a lot of big ad firms are struggling right now precisely because they’ve ignored the ethical component of advertising. They’ve relied on manipulation and cunning, which were effective in the 1980s when greed and self-interest prevailed, and they haven’t moved beyond that.
I admit that Nike’s product category has made it easier for us to be honest and open. Although at one level, all we’re really doing is selling sneakers, there’s something about athletic shoes and clothes that can inspire enthusiasm or even altruism. There’s an honest-to-goodness belief that we’re selling something that will help people. It’s like an ancient call to a way of life that isn’t going to harm the environment or mess you up. It keeps us charged up about what we’re doing.
Published by kind permission of the Harvard Business Review, all rights reserved. hbr.org
