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🤘🤘 How Nike Changed Sports Marketing Forever

🤘🤘 How Nike Changed Sports Marketing Forever

+ Positioning in the commodity space | Can you DesignJoy Product Marketing Service

Dejan Gajsek
July 19, 2023

Hey 🤘🤘!

In this week’s newsletter, I am looking into:

How Nike landed their biggest client and changed sports marketing forever
Positioning - how Snickers flipped the script on candy
Can you DesignJoy product marketing service?

Lezzgo!

Dejan - @dgajsek

The Origin of Air Jordan and Nike - How Far Would You go For Your Biggest Client

The movie “Air”, directed by Ben Affleck and starring Matt Damon, is an amazing story of how Nike were willing to bend the rules to get what they want.

Watch the Air trailer here.

Major show companies wanted to bag Jordan as the face of the brand, Adidas being the biggest contender in the game.

They were established and they had the dough.

And MJ wanted to sign with the German sports retailer too.

But his mom persuaded him to take a meeting with Nike.

Spoiler Alert

Nike won, because:

They understood MJ better - he wanted a legacy, not (just) money
Were willing to go against the rules to start the making of a legend
Changed the standard sports agreement by including royalties for every shoe sold

They signed the contract for $250,000 that year with an agreement to sell his own line of sneakers.

Doesn’t sound a lot, but in that time that was a big deal. And Nike had to pay $5,000 per game because the design of sneakers (black and white hi-tops) didn’t conform the NBA rules - Michael’s shoes didn’t have enough white color and they didn’t match the uniform of the team.

The “Banned” Jordan 1’s

The royalties MJ made from that contract brought him over $1B and is deemed as the most successful endorsements bargain in sports.

Nike expected to sell 100,000 pairs in the first year, but in just one month they had sold more than 450,000 pairs. Nowadays, a Nike Air Jordan 1 'Legends of Summer Black' model is priced at around 7,000 dollars, while last year, Jordan released the Air Jordan 37.

in March 2022, a pair of original Jordan 1s that MJ wore in the game sold for $560,000. You can get the unused ones above for mere $30,000.

Nike land Michael Jordan, he got his own brand and name of the shoe, won royalties and created a legacy.

The basketball and sports marketing was changed forever.

Go see “Air” — it’s a lesson on being competitive in the market.

Positioning - how Snickers flipped the script on candy

I’m a candy.

I am as delicious as I am unhealthy. And I look a lot like other sinful nutritional bombs - decadent peanuts with caramel on a waffle textured bar and covered with milk chocolate.

Glucose attack!

But how do I stand out among other candies that look and taste relatively the same.

Snickers “Hungry” campaign was an absolute genius marketing. Instead of positioning a candy bar as snack, they’ve used it as a meal replacement or a hunger solution.

The epic ad campaign followed. You’re not you when you’re hungry, remember?

Thanks to Rand Fishkin from SparkToro for this marketing lesson.

The tech industry is becoming commoditized and we’s spoiled for choice.

Find your angle.

Sponsored Post

Can You DesignJoy a Product Marketing Agency?

Corey Haines is doing exactly that with a launch of a Subscription-as-a-service agency model for Product Marketing.

Together with two friends (Zach Stevens - @zstvns, and Nick Loudon @ItsNickLoudon) the launch happened last week..

The Conversion Factory - an agency that provides Product Marketing service with one request at a time model.

This model isn’t new. It has been done before in the design department. Brett Williams created DesignJoy — a design-as-a-subscription service.

Brett, a one-person design agency, made more than $1M in revenue in 2022.

Brett’s post on IndieHackers. Source

Conversion Factory is attacking the problem in product marketing.

They are offering:

Website and Sales Collateral
CRO
Product Launches and Future Release
Product Optimization

With unstable job market, expensive resources, and relatively long velocity to actualization, this sounds like a great idea.

There’s no competition in terms of this subscription model, but then again neither was with DesignJoy.

The response to Corey’s Twitter launch was positive and when I was talking to him, he said he already had great conversations.

📣 I'm going all in on a marketing agency.
For 3 years I’ve said no to taking on more than 2 consulting clients.
That changes today.
Introducing: ✨ Conversion Factory ✨
Think of it as Product-Marketing-as-a-Subscription
— Corey Haines (@coreyhainesco)
Jul 10, 2023

Product marketing is inherently more complex than design, but the transparency, team’s quality, and clear tangibles are factors customers will approve.

Heck, this is something we do at Grow + Scale, but we haven’t productized it.

Should we? 🤔

Holler at us, if you need stellar assets and content and start winning deals again.