Social Listening: Nike

 "Just do it"

This is my favorite brand's slogan. This company provides one of the best quality of sporting goods, simple design that goes well with most styles, and reasonable price in terms of its quality and design. These characteristics of the company, Nike, has captivated all my attention about sportswear shopping. 

Nike provides long-lasting quality of its products as well as its best fits for workout and daily life. Nike's brand promise is: "To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world," and they believe every person could be an athlete. Their belief has encouraged people to be more athletic and active as well as spread positive perspective of being healthy. Their great marketing strategies such as sponsoring many athletes and sports teams ,having various target market, and pursuing innovation of its product by thinking out of the box, which has built strong relationships with their customers - Otaku. I would describe this company as the one is genius at captivating people's attention.

However, there are some opinions about Nike that people described. Some people love their products, ads, and effort to keep their business ethics, but there are some opposite voices about the company's ethics such as slave labor in China. According to BBC News, Nike has responded to the issue by conducting ongoing diligence with other suppliers in China to identify and access potential risks of employment of ethnic minorities.

Nike is famous as a company with amazing advertising skills, especially through twitter, they upload ads with great storytelling strategies. They convey their message with positive brand image to customers with memorable storytelling and the relationship between the company and their target market has been stronger. However, even Nike couldn't avoid loss in their profit from COVID-19 pandemic. According to Forbes, COVID-19 has changed consumers' shopping behaviors from visiting Nike locations to visiting Nike app. At this point, Nike focused on for the future which is direct-to-consumer business. From this strategy, their online sales grew dramatically, and the company is focusing on developing their brand approach to changed consumers shopping behavior. Also, Nike is expanding women's categories for the new customer construct, and I believe this plan will bring a greater profit for Nike by attracting various target market.

If I were the brand manager, I would compare our product and service with Nike's competitors such as lululemon and under armour to respond to customers' preference. In terms of approaching another target market - women's apparel market - it is important to understand how competitors have succeed in getting customers' attentions and the specialities of their products that customers have valued. Especially, Lululemon would be one of the best company to compare to Nike, because Lululemon has greatly succeed in targeting female shoppers. Nike has focused on athletic sports, but now it's time to develop their product line to something like yoga and pilates which is more popular sports for women.

By writing this post, I was able to improve my insight about the brand, Nike, by researching and analyzing the challenges that Nike has faced. This really helped me to understand the company's SWOT as well as it was a good time to learn about the company that I potentially want to work at in the future. Also, every time I write a post, I feel I have expanded my knowledge and insight about marketing industry and I'm really excited about improving my marketing skills!

Cited sources:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53481253

https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2017/10/27/nikes-challenges-in-the-u-s-market/#ae0ba0227df8