Basketball players “wanna be like Mike”, but shoe companies “wanna be like NIKE. ” NIKE is the worlds #1 company and controls more than 40% of the US athletic shoe market. The company designs and sells shoes for just about every sport, including baseball, volleyball, cheerleading, and wrestling. NIKE also sells Cole Haan dress and casual shoes and a line of athletic wear and equipment, such as hockey sticks, skates, and timepieces. In addition, it operates NIKETOWN shoe and sportswear stores and is opening JORDAN in store outlets in suburban markets.
NIKE sells its product to about 19,000 US accountants, in about 140 other countries, and online. Chairman, CEO, and co-founder Phil Knight owns. Nike Co. is very interesting, as well is a popular brand. Nike, pronounced NI-KEY, is the winged goddess of victory according to Greek mythology. She sat at the side of Zeus, the ruler of the Olympian pantheon, in Olympia. A mystical presence, symbolizing victorious encounters, NIKE presided over history’s earliest battlefields. A Greek would say, “When we go to battle, and win, we say it is NIKE.
Synonymous with honored conquest; NIKE is the twentieth century footwear that lifts the world’s greatest athletes to new levels of mastery and achievement. The NIKE “swoosh” embodies the spirit of the winged goddess who inspired the most courageous and chivalrous warriors at the dawn of civilization. Among artistic representations of Nike are the sculpture by Paeonius (c. 424 BC) and the “Nike of Samothrace. ” Rhodians probably erected the latter, discovered on Samothrace in 1863 and now in the Louvre Museum, Paris, about 203 BC to commemorate a sea battle.
Excavations have shown that the sculpture was placed alighting on a flagship, which was set in the ground in such a way that it appeared to float. If you were to break the word NIKE down, you would get Ni-key. The pronunciation for Nike is nI-kE. Its function is noun, and its etymology is Greek NiKE. If you defined the word NIKE, you would find out that it means the Greek goddess of victory. Another meaning and definition of a word is SWOOSHING. Main entry: Swoosh, function is noun, and it is an act or instance of swooshing. The origin of the swoosh dates back as far as 1971.
Phil Knight was supplementing his modest income from Blue Ribbon Sports Inc. by teaching an accountant class at Portland State University. There he met Carolyn Davidson, a graphic design student, who was working on a multi-perspective drawing assignment in the hallway. He offered her a couple of bucks per hour if she would do some design work for his small company. This all happened because “Representatives from Japan were coming for a presentation and Phil wanted some charts and graphs to show them” according to Davidson. Apparently this wasn’t the last time Phil had asked Carolyn Davidson to create a design for him and Blue ribbon Sports.
According to Davidson again, “Phil had asked her to work on a shoe stripe because supposedly Phil needed more inventory control. ” (In spring of 1992, the first shoe with the Nike Swoosh was introduced) There have always been numerous predictions and questions asked about what Nike pays its people. An average salary for a Nike Spokesman (Tiger woods) is $55,555 dollars per day, which adds up to 20,277,575 dollars in a one years earned salary. Other salaries of Nike employees such as an Indonesian factory worker who is making shoes makes $1. 25 per day and an on average of $456. er year.
Lastly, Nike CEO Phil Knight is worth roughly over $5. 8 billion dollars. Nike ads like any other businesses require interpretation. Some of this reading goes on at the conscious level, some unconsciously. As opposed to extremists on either side of the interpretative question, I fall most nearly to the constructivist point of view in that I view meaning as interplay between text and the reader. Ads work on a variety of different levels including, but not limited to, sign typology, paradigmatic meaning, psychological appeals, emotion, roles, values/beliefs, and knowledge.
Again, the impact of an ad comes from the interplay between these various aspects of make-up and the reader’s own notions about him/herself and the world. Rubber-soled shoes were first mass-marketed as canvas-top “sneakers” by U. S. Rubber, with its keds in 1917. But the elevation of athletic shoe manufacture to both a science and a fashion was due largely due to Phil Knight and Steve Bowerman of Oregon. In 1958, Phil Knight, a business major a the University of Oregon, and a miler on the track team, shared with his coach, Bill Bowerman, a dissatisfaction with the clumsiness of American running shoes.
They formed a company in 1964 to market a lighter and more comfortable shoe designed by Bowerman. In 1968, this company became NIKE, Inc. — named for the Greek goddess of Victory. At first, Knight and Bowerman sold their shoes in person, at track meets across the Western US. Their company thrived through a classic combination of entrepreneurship and innovation. Bowerman’s most memorable technical breakthrough was the optimal traction of the waffle soles he invented by shaping rubber in the waffle iron in his kitchen (1972). Other essential innovations were the wedged heel, the cushioned mid-sole, and nylon uppers.
Knight’s first great marketing ploy was announcing that “four of the top seven finishers” in the marathon at the 1972 Olympic Trials had worn Nike’s (the first three runners, in fact, had worn West German Adidas). Through the 80s and 90s, NIKE’s advertisements helped make it by far the foremost retailer of athletic shoes world-wide, thanks to the endorsements from superstars like Michael Jordan, and the catchy slogans like “Just Do It. ” After dozens of years, patents and commercials, NIKE and its competitors created an absolute mania for elaborate athletic shoes, in the US and aboard.
Though fashion remains a matter of taste, it is undeniable that both world-class athletes and even the average aerobics enthusiast owe a debt to the innovations of Phil knight and Bill Bowerman and to the industry they inspired. Phil Knight is the founder and CEO of the athletic gear company Nike. Knight and Nike helped start a sports business and revolution in the 1970’s changing old- fashioned tennis shoes into highly specialized equipment and promoting them as symbols of athletic prowess and success. Nike’s success made Knight one of the America’s wealthiest men.
In the 1990’s he was the subject of frequent protests over allegedly poor working conditions at Nike manufacturing plants in Asia. Phil Knight was born on February 24, 1938. He is as well married. His position in Nike is Chief Executive Officer, President and Chairman, Nike Inc. His educational background is Business Administration, University of Oregon (1959); M. B. A. , Stanford University (1962). His favorite personal sports are tennis, running, and golf. A co-founder of Nike and former University of Oregon miler with a personal best 4:10, Phil Knight received an MBA from Stanford University.
His master’s work provided the outline for the business that would become Nike, the world’s number-one sports fitness company. His theory? High-quality running shoes could be designed in the United States, manufactured in Asia, and then sold in America at lower prices than the then-popular West German-made running shoes. With a $500 investment matched by his co-founder and former coach Bill Bowerman, Knight began Blue Ribbon Sports (Nike progenitor) in 1964.
Off to an uncertain start, he sold his shoes out of his back of a station wagon but continued to practice as a C. P. A. and teach at Portland State, Univ. until 1969. The Cortez, the first shoe to appear under Nike brand, arrived on the athletic scene in 1972. Since then, Knight has inspired numerous innovations in the business of sports, including future-based ordering; substantial investment in long-term product research and development; national media reinforcement of performance and styling ties between product and athletes, and the creation of a customer- service program supported by a full-time technical team.
Nike’s Potential Growth: Knight wants to see Nike become a truly global sports and fitness company over the next 5 years. Global thinking, he stresses identities not only potential markets but types of sports and athletes that deserve Nike support. A personal statement stated by Knight is “it’s now my job to create an atmosphere of peace in the chaos of business- something I’ve learned from Asian business style. Phil Knight is currently the 13th richest man in the world. He is worth approximately 5. 8 billion dollars.
Phil’s 4th quarter dividend earnings for 1997 were 80 million dollars. Additional bonus given to Knight in 1995 was $787,500. The value of Nike stock owned by knight was $4. 5 billion in 1995. Some of Knights endorsements include Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and the Brazilian soccer phenom Renaldo. In 1992, The Sporting News has called him “The Most Powerful Man in Sports. ” Bill Bowerman is the co-founder of Nike as well. He was born February 9, 1911. He died on December 24, 1981 in his sleep of his Fossil, Oregon home on the third Saturday of Christmas Eve. He was 88 years old.
Bill was the person who more then anyone else started the nations jogging craze. He also was the inventor of the waffle sole for running shoes. In addition, his coaching tenure at the University of Oregon was highlighted by some of the most successful teams in the nation. He turned the college town of Eugene, Oregon into the running capital of the world, spread the gospel of jogging and fitness, and along the way, revolutionized the running shoe. During his coaching tenure from 1949 to 1972, Bowerman produced four national collegiate championship teams, plus two more that were runners up.
Individually, his interest, his athletes set 13 world and 22 American records. Among his 23 Olympic athletes was 1960 medallist Otis Davis, who won the 400 and ran the 4 x 400 relay. Besides Davis, his other top athletes reads like a Who’s Who in American distance–Dyrol Burleson, Jim Grelle, Bill Dellinger, Ken Moore, Wade Bell, and the late Steve Prefontaine (Hall of Fame member), Steve Savage and Keith Forman. A graduate of Oregon, Bowerman became active with the Nike Shoe Company after retiring from coaching.
He also coached 24 NCAA individual champions, 38 Pacific Coast Conference individual champions, 132 Northern Division individual champions, 4 NCAA team champions in 1962, 1964, 1965, and 1970, 33 Olympic team competitors, 64 All-Americans, and coached the 1972 Olympic track and field team. In 16 of his 24 years, his Oregon track team finished in the top 10 in NCAA championships. He owns 13 consecutive Northern division team championships. His dual-meet record at the U of O was 114-20, a winning percentage of . 843.
He served at the helm of the NCAA track and field coaches association and NCAA track and field rules committee, and was a professor emeritus at the U of O. Bowerman not only coached the athletes, but also was a tireless worker and innovator for the sport of track and field. He was instrumental in developing rubberized asphalt runaways, developed statewide programs for high school athletes, and a instituted jogging programs throughout Oregon that led to the nationwide jogging craze. Though his innovation and drive made him wealthy, Bowerman gave as much or more back to the community.
His matching-grant programs have contributed to Oregon’s education, arts, medical research and the environment. He’s given money to Gilchrist, Mapleton and Medford to pay for all-weather tracks and, when budget cuts threatened the Oregon baseball program, Bowerman dug into his own wallet to support the formation of a club baseball program. In 1990, he agreed to donate 2. 1 million dollars for the construction of a two-story building at the legendary Hayward Field on the UO campus that now bears his name. He also created the Bill Bowerman Foundation, which supports grass roots track-and-field programs throughout the country.