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Just because Steve Messiah Jobs says something does not mean that it is correct or relevant. Nike sell very different products to Apple and Nike know more about
by Theodores 13y ago
Just because Steve Messiah Jobs says something does not mean that it is correct or relevant. Nike sell very different products to Apple and Nike know more about fashion retail than Jobs ever did.
The problem with sports/fashion retail is that it is very subjective. Furthermore, for some products you need customers to have choice.
I have sold a few Nike products in my time (for cycling, yes, think Lance Armstrong...) and I did not feel they were that competitive on grounds of price, sales margin, fit, quality and so on. By any objective measure they were not that good.
However, what did the customers think? They bought it. Not all of the time, but some of the time. Depending on the customer I would steer them towards known best sellers, quality, value or sale items, however, sometimes they would find the Nike branded products suited them better - fit, colour, taste, the brand or whatever it was made them prefer those products.
Had Nike listened to Steve Jobs (or me) and got rid of all those shoddy cycling products then they would have lost all of those sales. Furthermore, those slightly more 'American sized' customers would not have found what it was that suited them.
- wdewind 13y agoI agree with your statement, re: Jobs, but disagree with your overall evaluation: the advice Jobs gave to Parker seems sound. It's important to note you are comparing a company that is 10 years older than Apple yet has a market cap an order of magnitude lower. Your anecdote is not incorrect, but it's not useful either since it doesn't show that Nike's original strategy was more useful. In fact, Nike's market cap has grown significantly (and significantly faster than it was growing before) since taking Jobs' advice, which is not to imply causation, but to refute the opposite. Nike may not have gotten rid of the shoddy cycling products (although we are talking post-2011, when did you sell Nike stuff?) but they did take Jobs' advice (at least according to Parker - I don't have the data on number of products).
- comrade_ogilvy 13y agoSports/fashion has its peculiarities, but your anecdote is not convincing. The big reason that Nike is so successful is that they have maintained their status of a premium brand, in a sweet spot a few notches above where the competition is cutthroat and less profitable. In the short term, crap sells and looks good for this year's sales number. In the long term, crap offers competitors too many openings to convince a consumer that Nike is actually overrated/overpriced. Saying "yes" to crap worked really well for Izod, up until the moment it failed catastrophically.