Brand
Nike
Role
Brand Architecture
Consumer Research
Innovation Design
Naming
Strategic Positioning
Trend Forecasting
Team
SVA Branding
Challenge
Most brands flourish, falter, and then die—making room for brands that are superior or more innovative. However, there are some brands that sustain their position in the marketplace despite shifts in social, economic, and cultural conditions. Why do some brands manage to evolve with the times while others fail? A fundamental understanding of the evolutionary phenomenon of culture is key to ensuring brands can maintain or improve their position in the marketplace. Their continuing success is contextual and dependent on myriad and sometimes mysterious factors.
Opportunity
Through robust critical analysis, we forecasted trends, identified business and brand opportunities, and created product innovation frameworks necessary to ensure Nike will sustain and succeed today, and thrive in an uncertain future.
Solution
In the last decade, Nike has been at the forefront of material and product innovation that improves human ability. Forecasted opportunities centered around changes in climate change, demographics, and attitudes towards performance, highlighted the need to find a better, more sustainable approach to winning. Nike needs to continue to innovate, invent and push the limits of science to expand the potential of human performance and ability. Already in 2022, the athletes playing the best and longest are boosting their performance with enhancing technology. By 2032, Nike can bring the benefits of biohacking to everyone; they have the expertise, data, credibility, and infrastructure to harness the potential of biohacking and lead the future of performance and victory. To write the 2032 playbook, Nike must enable people to move stronger and longer, unleashing their possibility, for the greatest way to win.
Athletes are recognizing that irresponsibly pushing the limits of performance is detrimental to their livelihoods and their lives. They are reclaiming bodily autonomy on systems designed to profit on burnout. We see a shift from exhaustion to exhilaration. Winning no longer needs to equate with depletion and exhaustion, instead, it should result in longevity and exhilaration. Introducing Nike’s first rule: play stronger, perform longer. Nike’s 2032 activations for the first rule are below.
Climate change is dictating where, when, and how athletes play. The future of winning will demand adaptive solutions that account for changes in temperature and terrain. To serve athletes ever-changing needs, Nike must leverage its material innovation to keep winning in evolving environments, moving from depletion of resources to activation. Introducing Nike’s second rule: protect the field, preserve the planet. Nike’s 2032 activations for the second rule are below.
Nike can broaden its audience base, creating space for underrepresented audiences that constitute a growing minority. By 2032, adults over the age of 65 will outnumber those under the age of 18 for the first time in history, and 61 million, or one in four adults in the US will be living with some type of disability. Nike must leverage its scale and technology to solve for the full spectrum of mobility, shifting from tokenized inclusion to expansion and creating space for typically marginalized groups. Introducing Nike’s third rule: expand possibility, actualize potential. Nike’s 2032 activations for the third rule are below.
This thesis was presented to the public on September 30, 2022.
To view the full rational and explanation, please view the presentation here.