Nike is 60 years old, and is it showing signs of middle age?
The brand still signs the world’s most high-profile athletes and has a legacy of proprietary technology.
The mojo was displayed at the Paris Olympics with a three-day ‘Nike on Air’ gala.
It debuted new shoes for runners, basketball, and soccer and optimized performance apparel for skateboarding and breakdancing. It also showcased Project A.I.R., a platform that leverages generative AI to design and print personalised prototypes for athletes in minutes.
It was as if the brand was pushing to remind everyone of its mojo. Forty years ago, at its pomp, the brand had debuted Air, a tiny, pressurised airbag in the shoe’s sole that gives athletes an energy return as their foot hits the ground. A legendary functionalisation of the brand’s ‘Just Do It’ promise with a literal swoosh of compressed Air. Today, the legend lives on moviedom with a movie called “Air” starring no less than Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, but does the brand’s mojo?
Or, like a lifetime achievement award, is the movie a tribute to a has-been cultural phenomenon?
The brave show at the Paris Olympics did not hide Nike’s struggles with low sales numbers and its longest losing streak since 1980. The company’s move from wholesalers to direct-to-consumer wasn’t as successful as hoped.
The reasons for Nike’s bad period are myriad, and it will probably cause them to go on for another 60 years.
The point I want to make is that many storied brands—Nike, Coco Cola, Levis, VW, Marks & Spenser, Bajaj, Titan—the list is long—are undergoing a crisis. And the commonality between them is that they are all “middle-aged” or “old.”
The most straightforward explanation for the crisis is that times change, consumers change, technologies change, and challenges come with change.
However, shouldn’t then the uber-successful leader brands should be the first to meet such challenges? They have the resources, expertise and experience.
But nine out of 10 ‘middle-aged’ leader brands flounder with a new generation of consumers.
Could the explanation lie in the realms of psychology – the mid-life crisis that affects most successful men in Western cultures as they slide into middle age?
While a mid-life crisis is, at its core, a disruption in self-confidence and self-image, its manifestation is a rejection of this disruption and an over-assertion of the past.
Is Nike’s Paris Olympics show an assertion of this sort?
The wise counsellors suggest that the proper response to a mid-life crisis is to evaluate the self, identify your core values, discard peripheral notions that no longer fit the circumstances, and orient your core values to the new paradigm.
Is Nike confronting a new generation for whom fitness is a holistic concept that deals with social attitudes, diet, and exercise? To them, is seeking the extra edge of proprietary technology in their daily exercise regime an aspect that robs it of a value they cherish -authenticity? So, while they admire Nike and the premier athletes whom it helps perform better, the admiration does not translate to them wanting the brand for themselves. They are happy with brands like On Running and Lululemon.
So, how does Nike be relevant to the new generation? For starters, it should be admitted that the mother brand is now a niche brand for performance athletes and the small part of the market that are aspiring athletes or have a self-image of being athletes. There is money to be made in that niche to support their other plans. It should then get down to using its inventiveness and brand-creation skills to launch a new brand that hooks onto the concept that fitness is a 360-degree concept with authenticity at its core. It could then build a whole range of products and services, including digital platforms and AI application layers to enable an individual to ‘Be the Fittest Yourself’.
The above is just an illustration. An innovative set-up like Nike would have scores of better ideas provided it got out of its middle-aged funk and stopped doubling down on the past.
The point is that a brand in a mid-life crisis needs to recognize the crisis, reevaluate and use the opportunity to reinvent.
There are so many well-resourced brands in mid-life crisis worldwide that I expect all the big consultancies to make a beeline for this rather lucrative pie.
But then, aren’t the McKinsey’s of this world also in mid-life crisis?
It may take a bold, young start-up consultancy to convince old, foggy brands to see their mid-life crisis as an opportunity to reinvent.
Finally, Olympics Season 31 comes to an end. The athletes left the Village to meet again and try living to the motto – Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together. The amount of space and time on media dedicated to the games will keep decreasing exponentially. Soon, we will get tired of talking about it.
The summer Olympics are in their last leg, and it has been one of the better editions for India, with the possibility of an all-time best haul of seven or eight medals at the time of writing this column. India won two silver and four bronze medals at London 2012, but the follow-up at Rio was filled with disappointment. Two medals came only at the fag end of the games, from PV Sindhu and Sakshi Malik.
By Prasana Krishnan
