Nike Executive summary

I designed and compiled our groups ideas into an executive summary for Nike.

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There’s a disconnect between our company and the external narratives regarding equal gender representation. Our female
athletes are not represented nearly enough. Correcting this through the use of ad campaigns, commercials, and community
outreach would lead to an increase in profit in our women’s segments and a stronger brand image. This document is intended
to cover our company’s narratives, key stakeholders, communication objectives, recommendations, and our implementation
plan moving forward.


We see an opportunity to fix this communication disconnect between us here at Nike and the external narratives. The external
perception is that we are not doing enough representation of women in our brand. We want women to have a voice and we
want to show young female athletes that they have role models that will inspire them to continue playing sports after their
youth years. Although we have made our first steps to changing these external narratives, we are continuing to strive to
represent women in the correct light.








We at Nike recognize the significance of employees as a stakeholder group that influences organizational effectiveness. For
instance, employees’ performance directly translates to business performance. The interests of these stakeholders include
fair compensation, career development opportunities, and a sense of purpose. According to Forbes, companies rely on their
employees to have a successful business and if the employees are not satisfied with the company they are representing, they
can directly affect the business (Russell, 2019).
The athletic community is a key stakeholder in our company because they have a significant influence on our overall brand
image. Consumers tend to buy more of a product that they see has a positive impact on the athletic communities. The athletic
communities care about this communication goal because they are not going to represent our brand if they feel we do not
meet their social standards as individuals.
There have been companies who have dealt with issues on the representation of women and have found solutions that were
vital to their company’s success. Always is a women’s hygiene brand and in 2014 they saw an issue with women being
misrepresented in the community with the derogatory slur of “like a girl” and created a commercial. After this aired in the
Super Bowl, women and men took #Likeagirl to every social media platform to show how gender won’t stop anyone from
being powerful. Due to Always producing this social experiment they were able to reach 90 million views which created an
emotional attachment to their brand (Always, 2014).
Under Armour, a close competitor, took their first steps towards making women a bigger part of their brand with the “I WILL
WHAT I WANT” campaign that featured two female brand ambassadors, Misty Copeland and Gisele Bündchen. Although
this was met with extreme backlash, Under Armour found a silver lining by implementing the negativity into their ad’s.
Following the campaign, there was a 28% increase in Women’s sales and a 42% increase in traffic to under armour's website
(Droga, 2020).
As you know in October of 2019, we at Nike partnered with the WNBA and NBA and began a community outreach, where
we asked 8
th
grade girls to share their ideas to grow basketball participation in their communities. When the WMBA and
NBA athletes chose a group of ten girls to participate in a training camp in Oregon, the girls shared their feedback on the
process. These girls said that they felt like someone cared and that someone was going to “change the game”. Due to the
success of this community outreach we want to use this idea and expand upon it and go a step further and open it up to all
ages of women and young females playing all sports. (Nike 2019).
















The Communication objective is to tell women’s stories while
making them our voice and constructing our corporate messages
around them.
Our corporate social responsibility strategy gives top priority to
customers as a stakeholder group that has the immediate need for
this change. Customers affect our overall revenues in sports shoes,
apparel and equipment market. These customers’ interest include
high quality products and reasonable prices. If the customers are not
brought into our values and motives, we will begin to lose them and
revenue.



The benefits of sports for girls are well-known. Based on our research,
we have found that encouraging girls to start playing sports at a young
age will positively impact them. Sports teach young girls’
commitment, respect, goal setting, winning, and accepting failure and
the response. Based off of these findings it's important to
communicate that we are striving to represent women correctly. These
two companies successfully implemented ad campaigns and
commercials into their plan for change which can be a very good
example for us moving forward.









Just Do It For Them

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The company Always forged an emotional connection with consumers by flipping a derogatory phrase and turning it into a
positive statement. This strategy worked great because they created a powerful advertisement and released it during one of
the most watched games of the year. We recognize this as one of the best-timed commercials, especially for female
empowerment and gender equality. If Nike was to release something similar to this, we believe that it would show our
customers the benefits of both boys and girls playing sports, and this communication would help boost our brand image.
Our first recommendation is to begin a social media advertisement (Just Do it… for them) that highlights women coaching
and playing sports at all levels. With the goal of inspiring young girls to get active and to illustrate that young females can
look up to their leaders and coaches. Having someone other than their mothers to help them while going through the
developmental phases of a teenager will be beneficial to these girls. Releasing this advertisement on every social media
platform during the NBA finals in June would be vital to reaching a broad audience and begin the transformation of our
external narratives.







Our final recommendation ties this campaign up. Throughout
these eight months (March-November) we will be filming and
compiling a commercial that focuses on women in the coaching industry such as Katie Sowers, a
San Francisco 49ers assistant coach and Becky Hammon, the San Antonio Spurs assistant coach.
The goal of this three-phase plan is to inspire young girls to continue playing sports and
for female adults to pursue more coaching jobs so that they can be the ones inspiring these young girls. We have created a
tentative timeline for these three initiatives, listed below.

After much research based on our own company, as well as other high-profile companies, we believe the social media
campaign will cost roughly $800,000 and then to play this ad during the NBA finals would cost approximately $2,000,000.
The $2,000,000 is based upon a 30 second advertising cost for 2019 of $900,000, not including taxes (Statista).

Following this campaign, we will begin a community outreach tour that will roughly cost $1,500,000 which includes travel
and 200,000 shirts for every kid in LA, New york, Mexico City, Vancouver, and Rio de Jainero. Each shirt costing 1
dollar, on top of the t-shirt and travel, we are going to hire some of the top female coaches around the country to come with
us and promote them in a new light. This community outreach tour will allow us to directly communicate with our
stakeholders that we care about this communication objective.

After the community outreach, we will begin and finalize the production of a commercial emphasizing this campaign,
aiming for release during the 2021 Super Bowl. A Super Bowl commercial brings more impressions than any other
sporting event in the United States. For this commercial, we have around 6 months for production and we estimate this will
cost roughly $10,000,000 over the course of this period. We want this commercial to be significant and to make a lasting
impression on the viewers, so we plan to make this ad one minute long. This will cost $11,000,000 based on the cost of a
30 second ad during the 2020 Super Bowl.

We believe these steps will bring a significant return on investment for Nike and have a long-term impact on the brand.
The return on investment that we plan to see is approximately 300 million dollars in revenue. This number is based off of
the value of the Colin Kaepernick advertisement campaign, which brought in 200 Million dollars. Based on this alone, we
believe the combination of the two campaigns will allow us to reach our target markets efficiently, as well as make our key
stakeholders extremely satisfied. Based on our budget of $25,000,000 and estimated revenues of $300,000,000, that brings
a return on investment of 1100%. Aiming these campaigns at some of the biggest sporting events will allow an even bigger
awareness and be more impactful for Nike in the long run.


.











We hope you trust us enough to move forward with these recommendations and are eager to speak with you and
make a decision by the end of the week. Please contact us if you have any questions or would like additional
information [email protected].



Our next recommendation is to begin a five-city community
outreach in September to Los Angeles, New York, Shanghai,
Taiwan, and Rio de Janeiro. In which, we will sponsor several
different sporting events for 7-14-year-old girls and boys. In
attempt to show these young girls and boys that we at Nike
want them to succeed and have someone to look up to we will
have female coaches running these events. We will also use
this opportunity to film for our upcoming Super Bowl
commercial and show the athletic community that we do care.



The implementation of the above stated recommendations will begin as
soon as possible and geared towards releasing the first advertisement
(Just Do It… For Them) on every social media platform by the NBA
finals in June. After releasing this in late June and all of July we will go
on a community outreach tour to four countries and five cities. From
here in September we will begin implementing focus groups into our
research and working on the commercial that will be released in January
of 2020 during the Superbowl.

Now that you have read about our company’s narratives, findings and
analysis, key stakeholders, communication objectives, recommendations,
and our next steps moving forward. It is in the best interest of our
company to create a social media ad campaign, community outreach, and
an impactful commercial that highlights women and young females in
sports to tie it all together.

3. 3


Sources:

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where-it-counts-most-consumer-perception/#38ad25172478
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market/#fd1f71e27df8























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files-for-chapter-11-bankruptcy-protection
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8. Purpose Moves Us. (n.d.). Retrieved February 11, 2020, from https://purpose.nike.com/
9. Read Nike's Mission Statement . (n.d.). Retrieved from https://about.nike.com/




10. Russell, C. (2019, August 22). Adidas or Nike? Which Retail Giant is Winning The Sneakers War? Retrieved
March 2020, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/callyrussell/2019/08/22/adidas-or-nike-which-retail-giant-is-
winning-the-sneakers-war/#66bf701612b7
11. Watson, S. K. (2018, June 11). After High School, Young Women's Exercise Rates Plunge. Retrieved March
1, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/06/11/618878274/after-high-school-young-
womens-exercise-rates-plunge

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