Nike’s Energy Marketing Strategy
After listening to 62 episodes of the “The Business of Hype” hosted by Jeff Staple, I found that this interview with Drieke Leenknegt has been one of my favorites. Leenknegt worked at Nike for 20 years after recently leaving her role as Global Vice President of Influencer Marketing and Collaboration. She seemingly worked her way up through the company while coming from a small village in Belgium where she worked in her mom’s sporting goods store, selling shoes starting at age 13. She made her way through university, and afterward worked at a radio station followed by an agency utilized by Nike.
During her interview at Nike, she first showed them how she thought differently - how she says in a “non-linear” fashion. She describes how her interviewer thought she was “bizarre” and “not normal” but says that a colleague of the interviewer convinced him to hire her because the sportswear giant seeks to hire those who think differently.
Eventually she moved to Nike’s European Headquarters in Amsterdam to work on “Active Life” (the precursor to Nike Sportswear), and then to Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon where she’s moved to marketing to work on a new business unit called “Energy”.
At one point in Nike’s history, they realized that region specific shoes became sought after in other markets around the globe. Nike had originally done small test runs in smaller regions outside of the United States, or even a single retailer just to study the SKUs performance. Eventually, there were people who realized they had to have these shoes, because most likely they’d never release in America, so they bought them overseas and shipped them back home. Nike wasn’t limiting runs from ill intentions, but from small supply emerged a resell market where adults and kids everywhere saw there was big money to be made, and for Nike a hole was discovered. Through a non-linear perspective, Nike found they had an opportunity. In order to reach global success across more product lines, they could create a new business through a cross of art, culture, and science; that’s where Drieke Leenknegt came in.
At Nike World Headquarters, Leenknegt and her team developed a foundation for what they called ‘Energy Marketing’ to build the “unspoken soul” of the brand. Marketing today may seem solely analytical, and performance based, but Leenknegt knows that to reach the consumer most effectively you need to realize that they are human; they desire connectivity. Specifically, through storytelling you can foster better relationships with your customers and simultaneously expand your audience. To reach this audience, you must first form better relationships with influential members of their communities. This is where Leenknegt found the intersection Nike was looking for.
Leenknegt and her team envisioned that energy marketing’s focus should be on the need to pass a story rather than to create a new story. Telling your own story as an artist or creative is important to your vision and your audience, but Leenknegt can’t stress enough in the podcast how much more meaningful it is to pass along to your audience a story they can relate to. In terms of connection and resonation with more groups of people, authentic brand narratives will hit much harder: they are essential to your brand’s soul and purpose, and people will see that. To be successful in marketing a mentor of Leenknegt’s, Sandy Bodecker said that she, “should not run away from linearity”. Instead, she should go to the intersection of linearity and non-linearity or between the creative and the analytical mind. She should teach herself to translate her thinking to different areas to push her potential, expand her comfort zone, uncover something new, and then get to work.
Nike’s energy marketing team’s foundation was laid in collaboration. Throughout the podcast, Leenknegt speaks insightfully on the fundamentals behind great collaborations. She says, “Collaborations done right grow your brand and your business. Collaborations not done well will harm your brand.” The number one fundamental is what Leenknegt calls “Cross-Pollination”. Before cross-pollination, however, it’s important that you first identify your brand DNA: who you are, how you operate, and where your business opportunities lie/what voids need to be filled. Cross-pollination seeks to combine different genetic materials from different organisms, creating a whole new variety. Thus combining brand DNA, to create something that cannot be created alone.
She says the basis for collaboration is to bring the two different entities together for a purpose, to solve the “Why?” not the “How?”, and to create a whole new language where you can see characteristics of each entity individually while at the same time embracing their synergy.
An example Leenknegt gives in the interview is Nike’s collaboration with Tom Sachs in ‘Nikecraft’. She points out that Nike and Tom Sachs think quite differently. Nike serves athletes to enhance athletic performance. Where Nike is the face of functional and industrial design in the athletic world, Tom Sachs, on the other hand, creates objects that are “wild” and “insane”, she says. His pieces are for fashion or show, and have no need to function, but to be admired from an external view; however, when you put Nike and Tom Sachs on the same project the result is great innovation adored for being a combination of crisp and clean fashion design and of purposeful industrial design.
Within the collaborative space it’s important to realize that the work being done is 50/50, it’s shared, meaning that mutual respect will get you the furthest. It’s not an easy journey when you bring together individuals who think in entirely different ways, but the real prize is what you can learn from one another to push your understanding of the world. Through eustress you can challenge each other to work under new conditions to make something truly revolutionary. Jeff Staple makes a point saying, “Collaborations are about relationships, not transactions”. In other words, collaborations are done between people, not businesses. If the sole purpose of the collaboration is about making money off your logos, then your product will never be a timeless classic. The two entities must be visionary in their own spheres if what they seek is disruptive synergy within the market.
At the end of the show, Drieke Leenknegt left listeners with 4 key takeaways:
1. Marketing and specifically energy marketing, seek to bring the worlds of business and culture together.
2. Because of cross-pollination you should seek out opportunity in your own life to push your own potential.
3. Embrace those who are different from you and gain a new perspective.
4. If you create your own path, people will come and find you.