NIKE IS GIVING ITS TROUPE OF ATHLETES A WORKOUT IN J.C. PENNEY STORES.Penney wasn’t spending Nike’s co-op marketing money fast enough, so Nikewent to the Plano, TX-based department store chain with a plan forbrand-intensive displays and a cool contest for kids. Oh, and a half-dozenor so top athletes, with their favorite childhood snapshots.
Nike wanted to drive traffic to children’s departments and reinforce itstagline, “What’s your game?,” by connecting kids to its stable ofspokes-jocks.
“We wanted to do something aspirational, but not just put athletes on apedestal,” says Bobbie Parisi, Nike’s retail resource manager for strategicdepartment stores. “We wanted to bring them down to the kids’ level.”
The solution: Show the athletes as kids. Display pieces featurethen-and-now photos of Ken Griffey, Jr., Andre Agassi, Michael Johnson, MiaHamm, and Gabrielle Reece. A measuring tape features Griffey’s age andsports accomplishments at different heights as he was growing up. An actualbasketball and football with handprints of pro players invite kids to seehow they measure up. Displays went up mid-April in the top 485 of Penney’s1,200 stores.
In mid-July, Nike breaks a Penney-only sweepstakes giving kids a chance tostar in their own trading cards. Entry forms have two player trading cards,one with a Nike athlete and the other blank. Kids keep the Nike cards, thenfill in the blank cards with their own stats and photo to enter. A winnerin each store gets 100 copies of his own trading card and posters of thecard displayed in the store. The Retail Group, Seattle, designed displaysand the promotion.
Nike paid for the campaign with co-op funds that Penney had accumulatedover a year or so. Penney couldn’t spend Nike’s money on its off-price ads,so the dollars – pegged to volume sales – piled up. “They had a pool ofmoney,” says Parisi, who joined Nike in August ’98 from Cuervo, where shemasterminded the Cuervo Island Nation campaign. “We wanted to build thebrand, drive traffic, and get kids interacting with Nike.”
Nike’s marketing mantra is “high image,” so it doesn’t participate inretailers’ price deals, and does few traditional promotions. “We don’t do alot of contests, or gift-with-purchase kinds of promotions,” Parisi says.”We want to treat kids like athletes, not just give them stuff. It’s easyto give stuff away. It’s more challenging to do creative promotions thatreally enhance the brand.”
Nike is expected to continue downplaying the ubiquitous but occasionallyinfamous swoosh in ads and displays in favor of the brand name. The company”felt it was being overused,” Parisi says. “It’s a precious item, and thereare careful guidelines on how to use it.”
Nike is ratcheting up account-specific marketing, with plans to do morestore-specific ads and product mixes for major chains beginning this fall.Three retail resource managers handle account marketing for strategicdepartment stores, sporting goods stores, and footwear giant Venator Group,whose chains include Foot Locker. Regional staffers also doaccount-specific work.
Footwear retailers locked in price wars are eager for tailored promotionsthat differentiate them from the outlet on the other side of the foodcourt. Price deals contributed to a nearly seven percent decline inwholesale sales to $7.5 billion in ’98, per Sporting Goods Intelligence.
Nike is doing some retail expansion of its own, adding three Niketownoutlets this year in Denver, Berlin, and London. It now has 12 Niketownstores, 58 factory outlets, and two Nike stores near Beaverton, OR,headquarters. O
INFO The Retail Group, Seattle, designs store interiors, fixtures andprototypes. Clients include Sears and Baskin-Robbins.
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