A warning to b2b marketers from nike
The brand that forgot it was a brand.
In 2020, Nike had a body, a swoosh, and fifty years of cultural authority. It decided what it needed was a funnel.
The results were exactly what the data predicted. Which is to say, the data predicted the wrong thing.
Three decisions. Each one rational in isolation. Together, they form the most expensive management case study in sporting goods history.
The first: eliminate categories. Replace decades of sport-specific expertise — running, basketball, football, fitness — with a gender-led model. Women. Men. Kids. The structure of a fast-fashion retailer, applied to a brand that had spent fifty years being the opposite of generic. The institutional knowledge left in the redundancy packages. The products that followed looked like it.
The second: end wholesale. Nike had built its dominance by being everywhere. The new strategy was to be somewhere — specifically, Nike.com. So the company terminated agreements with hundreds of retail partners, redirected its best product to its own channels, and handed its competitors something they hadn't managed to acquire in decades of trying: shelf space. The occasional buyer, unable to find Nike where they'd always found Nike, found something else instead. They seemed fine.
The third: replace brand marketing with performance marketing. Pump billions into programmatic advertising to drive traffic to a platform that converts a tiny fraction of the people who arrive there. Stop making campaigns that moved culture. Start making content that moved cursors. Invest heavily in something measurable and largely ineffective, while defunding something effective and harder to measure. Nike hadn't made a brand campaign worth remembering since 2018. In 2024, the year of the Paris Olympics, the EMEA activation offered consumers a 20% discount if they ran 5k.
In 2008, Beijing, they made the world run for free.
The logic behind each decision was coherent. Data-led distribution. Digital-first demand. Loyalty over penetration. The kind of thinking that presents beautifully in a strategy deck and erodes quietly in the market.
Byron Sharp could have saved them several billion dollars. The finding is not obscure: loyalty follows penetration, not the other way around. Focus on existing consumers and your business shrinks. Focus on reach and the loyalty takes care of itself. Nike chose to ignore this, spent accordingly, and expressed surprise at the results.
On June 28th, 2024, the market removed $25 billion of value in a single session. This was not a verdict on a quarter. It was a verdict on four years.
The brand is not dead. The swoosh still means something to a large number of people who couldn't tell you why, which is precisely how brand equity is supposed to work. Nike still generates $5 billion in operating profit annually. It has no debt. It has a history of returning.
But the competence that built the product leadership is gone, not just deprioritised. The wholesale partners who were abandoned remember being abandoned. The marketers who knew how to build cultural moments were thanked for their contributions. And the two executives who made these decisions are still in position, presenting action plans to address the problems their action plans created.
There is a word for when the cure and the disease are the same thing.
Nike used to know what it was. An inspiration company that sold shoes. The shoes were the proof. The inspiration was the product.
Somewhere between the flywheel and the funnel, it forgot which one was which.