Étude du groupe Nike (document en anglais)

Nike

Nike, Inc. is an American multinational corporation that is engaged in the design, development and worldwide marketing and selling of footwear, apparel, equipment, accessories and services. The company is headquartered near Beaverton, Oregon, in the Portland metropolitan area.

We will see, in a first part, the origins and the history of the brand, and in a second part, the Nike’s place in the world of sport.

In 1950, while Adidas dominates the sport, shoes industry, Phil Knight a student at the University of Oregon and his athletics coach Bill Bowerman founded the Blue Ribbon Sports (RBS), which will became Nike in May 1978. The logo, named the Swoosh, was created in 1971 by Carolyn Davidson who is student in graphic art. The Swoosh is, according to a current nickname, the Nike logo. The logo is simple, consisting of a comma placed upside down and horizontally, supposed to give a sense of movement, and represent a stylized wing of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, which also gave its name the brand. This is a commercial logos most recognizable worldwide. For her job, she was paid only thirty five dollars! In 1988, the logo receive the slogan “ just do it” which means “ stop talking, stop trying, stop dreaming” in fact “ just do it “. At the origins, Nike was specialized in the athletics shoes manufacture and important their products from Japan. In 1981, Nike became the number one in the field of basket shoes and the company benefits for being traded. But the Nike story is not a fairy tail. In 1997, the scandal broke: Nike is accused to make their products by children. For example, a journalist shows us on this photography a Pakistani child sewing a football. In 2011, they are also accused of using toxic chemical substances. Nike is engaged to eliminate these substances to 2020.

In spite of this scandal, Nike found a dominant place in the sport world. Indeed, we can see the famous swoosh everywhere in the world, on billboards, on television, on sport equipments and clothes. The mark sponsors different sports like soccer, basket ball, tennis, rugby, American football and of cause athletics. It sponsors also many clubs and national federations and players like Neymar, Cristiano Ronaldo and Mathieu Valbuena… in 1984, the basket ball become the flagship sport of Nike with the Michael Jordan’s signature. This gives birth of the famous basket shoes “Nike Air Jordan”. Nike even integrates the cycling world becoming the official supplier of the tour de France in 1990. The first television ads were made in 1982 and since then, ads mushroom over the years.

To conclude, from an economic point of view Nike shares yet today the sport equipment market with its concurrent ADIDAS. From a social point of view, we can say that today, Nike and marks in general are because a dress code, not even for practice sport but for dressing every day, especially among young. We can easily note this here, in our Montciel high school.

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