Word: nike
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...group of Nike marketing executives gathered in a fourth-floor conference room on the company's Beaverton, Ore., campus and looked into the future. On the whiteboard were the names of five possibilities for the company's next big sponsorship push. Two of them, the NFL and the NBA, were in sports where Nike was well established, but the other three represented worlds where Nike was all but unknown: the Brazilian soccer team, the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team and a teenage golfing phenom named Tiger Woods. Wall Street was waiting to see what Nike would do to follow...
Investors had good reason to be skeptical. Golf is a notoriously hermetic industry, dominated by a handful of top clubmakers with the advantage of years of tradition and a loyal customer base. Nike signed Tiger Woods before it had so much as a golf ball to put into his hands. But over the past decade, Nike Golf has introduced 10 lines of clubs, 10 series of balls, several styles of golf shoes, and an array of course-worthy golf apparel worn by the 22 swoosh-wielding players on the tour. With the number of golfers in the U.S. flat over...
Even more surprising, Nike's all-out effort has produced some genuine innovation--including the Sumo2, which capitalizes on something called the moment of inertia; the geometric shape minimizes the twisting of the club head during an off-center ball strike, translating into a straighter, longer stroke off the tee. "Nike timed it so well that when they decided to get serious and get into golf equipment, they had the ultimate endorser in Tiger Woods," says Marshal Cohen, chief analyst at NPD Group. "Then they introduced new technology into the marketplace and really rejuvenated the golf industry...
...Golf and Nike were not obviously made for each other. Indeed, everything about the golf business was contrary to Nike's corporate DNA. Its core business was footwear and apparel, but golf was driven by equipment. Nike distributed to large national accounts such as J.C. Penney and Foot Locker, while golf products were sold in pro shops and specialty retailers that did nowhere near the volume of business that Nike was used to handling. "The only way to run golf successfully was to run it totally separate from the rest of the company," Nike's Wood says...
...shoes. However, instead of showcasing the timeless attributes of early hip hop culture, the video serves only to show how different things are, nowadays. The irony is that, regardless of how many so-called hip hop tropes are thrown across the screen, this song is about shoes that Nike paid these rappers to rap about. And though this is nothing new in the culture, it’s a solemn reminder of the capitalistic nature of rap today as supposed to the more innocent days of floppy disks and huge mixers in tiny studio rooms. Similarly...