This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here. More From Forbes. Nov 11, , pm EST. Nov 11, , am EST. This was when the Berlin Wall was still intact. Adidas was marketed in the United States by distributorships that were regional - Stokan represented the southeast, and was based in Atlanta. But those distributorships didn't have a lot of authority and he'd still have to get the okay from the German headquarters to give Jordan the deal he wanted. Now at the time - and this is verified by Shoe Dogs, which is Phil Knight's book - Nike was bordering on bankruptcy.
They were having a tough time trying to find financing. We were No. Stokan's run at Adidas was quite a successful one, but he's still haunted by what might have been with Jordan - and with others. He signed Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski to a seven-year contract with Adidas in , and then left to go to Converse. He'd also signed Herschel Walker. Then he had Jordan ready to go - or so he thought. The biggest regret I've had in my business career is losing Michael Jordan to Nike.
Smith had been with Converse most of his career. Smith had been intrigued at how much Peterson and Jordan liked the Adidas shoe. He proposed an option to Stokan that half of his team could wear Adidas and the other wear Converse, but Stokan said there'd be too much money at stake for that to happen. And naturally, as with most things with Michael Jordan, he remembers history a bit differently if it means he can make it into a slight that provides him an extra edge or motivation.
Stokan ran into Jordan at the Bahamas in Atlantis on a trip with his family during Jordan's annual golf tournament. Jordan, hanging out with his typical crew, recounted the same story about almost signing with Adidas that Stokan did - nearly verbatim.
The Europeans didn't know that the shoe wars were going to be fought here in the US, and they made the biggest mistake they could've ever made," Stokan said. Nike's margins were a little better than Adidas', Stokan said, because they manufactured their shoes cheaply in other countries while Adidas owned its own manufacturing firms. But even with that, Nike was a struggling company at that time.
The resurgence of their brand caused by Jordan's shoe taking off, Stokan believes, saved the business and led us to where we are today with Nike as a dominant force. It actually owned the manufacturing buildings and everything. 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.
Tennis is another good example. We have a very focused category that has been built around the personalities of John McEnroe and Andre Agassi. We created the Challenge Court Collection—very young, very anti-country club, very rebellious—and we became the number one selling tennis category in the world. So instead of diluting what Challenge Court stood for, we created a second category within the tennis framework called Supreme Court, which is more toned down.
Each of those categories stands for something distinct. Have you exhausted the list of things that fit under the Nike umbrella? The core consumer in fitness is a little different from the core consumer in sports. Fitness activities tend to be individual pursuits—things like hiking, bicycling, weight-lifting, and wind surfing. And even within the fitness category, there are important differences.
We found that men do fitness activities because they want to be stronger or live longer or get their heart rate or blood pressure down. Their objectives are rather limited. But in , we acquired Cole-Haan, a maker of dress shoes and accessories. Cole-Haan is part of Nike, Inc. In fact, when people talk about Nike, the TV ads are practically all they want to talk about.
But we became a billion dollar company without television. Our first TV campaign was for Visible Air, which was a line of shoes with transparent material along the midsole so consumers could see the air-cushioning technology. Having gone through the painful experience of laying people off and cutting overhead in the mids, we wanted the message about our new line of shoes to hit with a punch, and that really dictated TV advertising. The Visible Air launch was a critical moment for a couple of reasons.
Visible Air was a hugely complex product whose components were made in three different countries, and nobody knew if it would come together. Production, marketing, and sales were all fighting with each other, and we were using TV advertising for the first time. There was tension all the way around. We launched the product with the Revolution campaign, using the Beatles song.
We wanted to communicate not just a radical departure in shoes but a revolution in the way Americans felt about fitness, exercise, and wellness. The ads were a tremendous hit, and Nike Air became the standard for the industry immediately thereafter. There are 50 different competitors in the athletic shoe business.
Why do people get married—or do anything? Because of emotional ties. That approach distinguishes us from a lot of other companies, including Reebok.
Our advertising tries to link consumers to the Nike brand through the emotions of sports and fitness. We show competition, determination, achievement, fun, and even the spiritual rewards of participating in those activities. By doing new things. Innovation is part of our heritage, but it also happens to be good marketing. We saw the company as having a great competitive advantage because we had a great product at a great price.
And it worked a little bit. But what really made things pop was when we innovated with the product. We need a way of making sure people hear our message through all the clutter. Bo Jackson and Michael Jordan stand for different things. Characterizing them accurately and tying them to products the athletes really use can be very powerful. We test the concepts beforehand, but we believe that the only way to know if an ad works is to run it and gauge the response.
Although some of the calls will be negative, complaints tend to be in the great minority. Our basic philosophy is the same throughout the business: take a chance and learn from it. What are some of the risks? The Hare Jordan, Air Jordan commercial that aired during the Super Bowl represented a big risk from both a financial and a marketing standpoint.
It showed Michael Jordan teaming up on the basketball court with Bugs Bunny. It could have been too silly or just plain dumb. The only criticism we got was from the National Stutterers Association for using Porky Pig at the end. Humor is always a risky business.
Take our advertising to women. We produced some ads in that we thought were very funny but many women found insulting. They were too hard edged. We got so many complaints that we spent three or four years trying to understand what motivates women to participate in sports and fitness. We did numerous focus groups and spent hundreds of hours on tennis courts, in gyms, and at aerobics studios listening to women.
Those efforts paid off in our recent Dialogue campaign, which is a print campaign that is very personal. The text and images try to empathize and inspire. Even there it was risky to use such an intimate voice in the ads, but it worked. The campaign to launch the Air running shoe comes to mind. The advertising agency was working with seven directors from around the world and trying to translate words into all those different languages.
In the end, we used no words, just images of various kinds. One ad showed a spaceship zooming in on a Waffle Trainer outsole. Another showed cartoon characters bouncing on the shoe to demonstrate the cushioning.
When we looked at the ad a month before its Super Bowl launch, it seemed fragmented and almost goofy. It was neither animal nor vegetable. So we ran a Nike general purpose ad, which was safe but somewhat boring. You have to be creative, but what really matters in the long run is that the message means something.
You have to convey what the company is really all about, what it is that Nike is really trying to do. They spend countless hours trying to figure out what the product is, what the message is, what the theme is, what the athletes are all about, what emotion is involved. People at Nike believe in the power of emotion because we feel it ourselves. A while ago there was a book published about Nike, and one person who reviewed it said he was amazed that a group of intelligent, talented people could exert so much passion, imagination, and sweat over pieces of plastic and rubber.
It saves us a lot of time. Sports is at the heart of American culture, so a lot of emotion already exists around it. People already know a lot about him. No matter. When I was younger, my parents used to buy me random shoes. I never had a chance to buy anything I liked. Now that I work and can buy shoes, I buy things that are more exclusive.
I just love the shoes. I pay too much money for them. You gotta keep them clean, all day. I wear Kobes to play. My friends wear them. Famous people wear Jordans all the time. Sometimes girls compliment me on them at school. I got my first pair about five years ago. I have 15 pairs now. My favorite player is Carmelo Anthony. My advice for the Knicks?
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