Repositioning Nike Golf | From category exit debate to $180M market leader

The ultimatum

The ultimatum also rolled down to the agency: the Nike Golf team wanted to fire Wieden + Kennedy because they felt like the agency didn’t “get” golf. They weren’t wrong: the “Jockstrap required” headline became ammunition for conversations within Nike. And with basketball becoming the lion’s share of Nike’s revenue and attention, golf was being neglected.

Authentic to Nike, or reverent to golf. The brand was stuck between two answers to the wrong question.

What golfers said

To bring the agency and client teams together around Phil’s question, I led a national qualitative consumer research dive to understand how golfers actually saw Nike in golf. Not how Nike saw itself, and not what the category assumed, but what the people on the course believed.

The picture was consistent. Golfers respected Nike’s athletic credentials. Nobody doubted the brand knew how to make athletes better. But the brand lacked authenticity in golf, and in golf authenticity is paramount. A sport built on etiquette, honor and self-reported scores does not hand out credibility to a brand because it won somewhere else.

That reframed the problem. Nike did not need to choose between being itself and being respectful. It needed to earn the right to be itself, in golf, on golf’s terms.

One question

The brief forced everything down to a single question: How does Nike define “Fearless” in the context of golf?

Fearless was the Nike part. Nike’s athletes attack; that is the brand’s truth and it had to stay. The context was the golf part. Fearless on a basketball court looks like one thing. Fearless on the first tee, in front of people who will judge your swing and your manners, looks like something else. Answer that question with specificity and the two poles stop being opposites.

Golf is an Invitation

The answer launched as “Golf is an Invitation” penned by legendary adman Jim Riswold. The campaign authenticated Nike in the category: it spoke to the sport with the respect golfers demanded while keeping the brand’s own posture intact. Nike was no longer a sneaker company visiting golf. It was a brand with a point of view about what golf could be.

That authenticity set the stage for the signing of Tiger Woods and the “Hello World” launch. The campaign had built the ground that Tiger stepped onto.

The effect

The business scaled from $30 million to $180 million in under two years. Then on to #1 in golf, the number Phil Knight had set as the price of staying in the category.

The lesson travels. When a team is stuck between two identities, the research job is not to pick a side. It is to find the one question that makes the sides compatible, and then answer it.