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 Nike went to the Plano, TX-based department store chain with a plan for brand-intensive displays and a cool contest for kids. Oh, and a half-dozen or so top athletes, with their favorite childhood snapshots.
Nike wanted to drive traffic to children’s departments and reinforce its tagline, “What’s your game?,” by connecting kids to its stable of spokes-jocks.
“We wanted to do something aspirational, but not just put athletes on a pedestal,” says Bobbie Parisi, Nike’s retail resource manager for strategic department stores. “We wanted to bring them down to the kids’ level.”
The solution: Show the athletes as kids. Display pieces feature then-and-now photos of Ken Griffey, Jr., Andre Agassi, Michael Johnson, Mia Hamm, and Gabrielle Reece. A measuring tape features Griffey’s age and sports accomplishments at different heights as he was growing up. An actual basketball and football with handprints of pro players invite kids to see how they measure up. Displays went up mid-April in the top 485 of Penney’s 1,200 stores.
In mid-June, Nike breaks a Penney-only sweepstakes giving kids a chance to star 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, then fill in the blank cards with their own stats and photo to enter. A winner in each store gets 100 copies of his own trading card and posters of the card displayed in the store. The Retail Group, Seattle, designed displays and the promotion.
Nike paid for the campaign with co-op funds that Penney had accumulated over 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 of money,” says Parisi, who joined Nike in August ’98 from Cuervo, where she masterminded the Cuervo Island Nation campaign. “We wanted to build the brand, drive traffic, and get kids interacting with Nike.”
Nike’s marketing mantra is “high image,” so it doesn’t participate in retailers’ price deals, and does few traditional promotions. “We don’t do a lot 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 easy to give stuff away. It’s more challenging to do creative promotions that really enhance the brand.”
Nike is expected to continue downplaying the ubiquitous but occasionally infamous 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 there are careful guidelines on how to use it.”
Nike is ratcheting up account-specific marketing, with plans to do more store-specific ads and product mixes for major chains beginning this fall. Three retail resource managers handle account marketing for strategic department stores, sporting goods stores, and footwear giant Venator Group, whose chains include Foot Locker. Regional staffers also do account-specific work.
Footwear retailers locked in price wars are eager for tailored promotions that differentiate them from the outlet on the other side of the food court. Price deals contributed to a nearly seven percent decline in wholesale sales to $7.5 billion in ’98, per Sporting Goods Intelligence.
Nike is doing some retail expansion of its own, adding three Niketown outlets this year in Denver, Berlin, and London. It now has 12 Niketown stores, 58 factory outlets, and two Nike stores near Beaverton, OR, headquarters.
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