Who is phil knight

This interview was conducted at Nike, Inc. HBR: Nike transformed the athletic shoe industry with technological innovations, but today many people know the company by its flashy ads and sports celebrities.

Is Nike a technology company or a marketing company? For years, we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product.

What I mean is that marketing knits the whole organization together. The design elements and functional characteristics of the product itself are just part of the overall marketing process. We used to think that everything started in the lab.

Now we realize that everything spins off the consumer. And while technology is still important, the consumer has to lead innovation. We have to innovate for a specific reason, and that reason comes from the market. Our success. In the early days, anybody with a glue pot and a pair of scissors could get into the shoe business, so the way to stay ahead was through product innovation.

We happened to be great at it. Bill Bowerman, my former track coach at the University of Oregon and cofounder of the company that became Nike, had always customized off-the-shelf shoes for his runners. Over the years, he and some other employees came up with lots of great ideas that we incorporated.

The Waffle Trainer later became the best-selling training shoe in the United States. We were also good at keeping our manufacturing costs down. The big, established players like Puma and Adidas were still manufacturing in high-wage European countries. But we knew that wages were lower in Asia, and we knew how to get around in that environment, so we funneled all our most promising managers there to supervise production.

Not formally. We just tried to get our shoes on the feet of runners. And we were able to get a lot of great ones under contract—people like Steve Prefontaine and Alberto Salazar—because we spent a lot of time at track events and had relationships with the runners, but mostly because we were doing interesting things with our shoes.

Naturally, we thought the world stopped and started in the lab and everything revolved around the product. For one thing, Reebok came out of nowhere to dominate the aerobics market, which we completely miscalculated.

By the time we developed a leather that was both strong and soft, Reebok had established a brand, won a huge chunk of sales, and gained the momentum to go right by us. And on top of that, we made a disastrous move into casual shoes. Practically the same as what happened in aerobics, and at about the same time.

We went into casual shoes in the early s when we saw that the running shoe business, which was about one-third of our revenues at the time, was slowing down. We knew that a lot of people were buying our shoes and wearing them to the grocery store and for walking to and from work. Since we happened to be good at shoes, we thought we could be successful with casual shoes. But we got our brains beat out. By the mids, the financial signals were coming through loud and clear.

Nike had been profitable throughout the s. Then all of a sudden in fiscal year , the company was in the red for two quarters. We lost some very good people that year. We reasoned it out. The problems forced us to take a hard look at what we were doing, what was going wrong, what we were good at, and where we wanted to go.

We had to fill in the blanks. We had to learn to do well all the things involved in getting to the consumer, starting with understanding who the consumer is and what the brand represents. The switch was easier than you might think. I learned long ago that a building is not purely functional; it means something to people and evokes an emotional response.

A Huarache running shoe or an Air Jordan basketball shoe is not just a combination of price and performance. Inspiration for a design can come from anywhere—from a cartoon, a poster, the environment. But the design process almost always involves the athletes who use our product. Take Bo Jackson.

When I was designing the first cross-training shoe for Bo, I watched him play sports, I read about him, I absorbed everything I could about him. Bo reminded me of a cartoon character. Not a goofy one, but a powerful one. To me, he was like Mighty Mouse. So the shoe needed to look like it was in motion, it had to be kind of inflated looking and brightly colored, and its features had to be exaggerated.

Working with Michael Jordan is a little different. He has his own ideas about how he wants the shoe to look and perform. When we were designing the Air Jordan 7, for instance, he said he wanted a little more support across the forefoot, and he wanted more color. The Air Jordans had been getting more conservative over the years, so what I think he was telling me—without really telling me—is that he wanted to feel a little more youthful and aggressive.

Michael has become more mature and contemplative in recent years, but he still plays very exciting basketball, so the shoe had to incorporate those traits as well. The imagery in the poster was very exciting and strong and slightly ethnic. I showed Michael the poster, and he thought it elicited the right emotion, so I drew from that.

We came up with a shoe that used very rich, sophisticated colors but in a jazzy way. So I kept thinking about the outdoors, and that led to Native Americans, who did everything outdoors—from their tribal rituals to their daily chores. What did they wear? Moccasins, which are typically comfortable and pliable. And that led to the idea of a high-tech, high-performance moccasin. The soles are flexible so you can pad down the trail, the leather is thin and lightweight, the outsole has a low profile, and the colors are earthy.

Stories about how we arrived at particular designs may be entertaining, but the storytelling also helps us explain the shoes to retailers, sales reps, consumers, and other people in the company. In the early days, when we were just a running shoe company and almost all our employees were runners, we understood the consumer very well. There is no shoe school, so where do you recruit people for a company that develops and markets running shoes?

The running track. It made sense, and it worked. We and the consumer were one and the same. When we started making shoes for basketball, tennis, and football, we did essentially the same thing we had done in running.

We got to know the players at the top of the game and did everything we could to understand what they needed, both from a technological and a design perspective. Our engineers and designers spent a lot of time talking to the athletes about what they needed both functionally and aesthetically. It was effective—to a point. But we were missing something. Despite great products and great ad campaigns, sales just stayed flat.

We were missing an immense group. We saw them as being at the top of a pyramid, with weekend jocks in the middle of the pyramid, and everybody else who wore athletic shoes at the bottom. But that was an oversimplification. Just take something simple like the color of the shoe. One of our great racing shoes, the Sock Racer, failed for exactly that reason: we made it bright bumble-bee yellow, and it turned everybody off.

To understand the rest of the pyramid, we do a lot of work at the grass-roots level. We go to amateur sports events and spend time at gyms and tennis courts talking to people. We have people who tell us what colors are going to be in for , for instance, and we incorporate them. Beyond that, we do some fairly typical kinds of market research, but lots of it—spending time in stores and watching what happens across the counter, getting reports from dealers, doing focus groups, tracking responses to our ads.

We just sort of factor all that information into the computer between the ears and come up with conclusions. Understanding the consumer is just part of good marketing. You also have to understand the brand. That whole experience forced us to define what the Nike brand really meant, and it taught us the importance of focus.

Without focus, the whole brand is at risk. The ends of the earth might be right off that ledge! Once you say that, you have focus, and you can automatically rule out certain options. To a point. A brand is something that has a clear-cut identity among consumers, which a company creates by sending out a clear, consistent message over a period of years until it achieves a critical mass of marketing. Otherwise the meaning gets fuzzy and confused, and before long, the brand is on the way out. Look at the Nike brand.

From the start, everybody understood that Nike was a running shoe company, and the brand stood for excellence in track and field. Phil Knight Chairman Emeritus, Nike. Birth Details February 24, Portland, Oregon. Phil Knight was at Stanford pursuing business studies when he came up with the idea for an athletics shoe company while working on a term paper One of the aspects of the idea: manufacture shoes in Japan where labour was cheap to fight the market dominance of Adidas which operated out of Germany Few years later, Knight took the first step towards realising his idea when he travelled to Japan and struck a deal with a local shoe manufacturer Onitsuka Tiger Co.

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As we saw in the introduction, Nike is considered as one of the great brands of our times. Yet founder Phil Knight is not a branding and advertising man. Moreover, he was an accountant for most of the early years of Nike. That is right; he did Nike as a side job before going all in. Another area where Knight sheds modern best practices is in management. Conventional wisdom says managers should be available.

They should be there to help their employees. To be in service of their teams. They should also praise people often and so on. Leadership is always about inspiring others. Without inspiration, there are no followers. Without followers, there is no leader.

But great leaders go beyond that and encourage others to become leaders themselves. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Awards