----- Original Message ----- From: "budge" <budge at el-pleasant.org>
> <http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/DOT/personnel/gboas/BrandNEWS.htm>
>
> Ian, I don't see any fear of Naomi Klein in the article you
> forwarded.
>
========================
That marketing-advertizing mavens are even discussing such a work almost 4 years after it hit the bookstore shelves says something, no ? What was that Ghandi quip again?
The changing face of the brand
They began as cottage industries and ended up as global players. Now labels like Nike are out of favour on Wall Street - and losing their cool on the high street. What happens when a brand gets too big for its trainers?
Geraldine Bedell Sunday January 19, 2003 The Observer
'Find yourself' urges the hoarding in the entrance to Niketown, which is exactly what I want to do. They seem to think that's possible, if you buy a pair of their trainers.
To be honest, I've always been rather scared of trainers and their complicated street semiotics, but my toes have finally gone through the last pair I bought four years ago: blue Acupunctures, shaped like lightweight bricks. I thought they were pretty funky and, usefully, they did up with Velcro, thus avoiding the dilemma over whether to tuck in the laces and feel they were falling off, or do them up and be uncool.
But they're not funky any more and neither am I. I am keen, however, to find out who I am, or more precisely, who I want to be: who is this self I'm going to find up the escalators in Niketown? Richard Wharton, buying director of Offspring, the first trainer shop where you didn't have to engage in an elaborate pretence that trainers were about sport, says he can tell what sort someone will buy as soon as they walk in, and also that manga urban warriors go for Acupuncture. I don't even know what one of these is, but it doesn't sound like something a mother of four can aspire to gracefully.
He adds that if he sees a woman who looks like she would rather be in Prada (he is being polite about being out of one's depth, I think) he might steer her towards a pair of white Converse Jack Purcells, a revival of a 1935 shoe, named after the badminton player, or perhaps a pair of Puma Mostros. If she's 'more of a council house girl' maybe some Adidas Superstars or Puma Sprints. The customer wearing the new parka and distressed denims will head for Nike Dunks or Converse. This type - the Hoxton boho set - also wear Dunlop Green Flash 'ironically'.
It's all very complicated. One kind of Nike, the Dunk, sounds like the image I'm after, another doesn't. Down the street at size - the fashion subsidiary of JD Sport - they put anti-theft tags on only one type of shoe, the Nike Air Max 90, which is attractive to 'gangsta rap kind of people, though actually most of them live at home with their parents'.
In Niketown, I hang over the balcony on the top floor, peering down through the over-designed atrium - theatre lights, industrial-chic walkways - while Lindsay Davenport demolishes an opponent at the Australian Open on a big screen in front of me. In here, it's all about technology. Do I need shoes with breathable mesh, air-filled polyurethane bags, or sneakers teetering on what look like rubber springs, which, the displays inform me, museum-style, are the result of '16 years of R&D'?
The shoes on springs are called Shox and next month Nike is launching an updated version, the Shox XT, accompanied by an advertising campaign. The foam cylinders are supposed to work like shock absorbers, trampolining your foot forwards every time your heel hits the ground, and the first versions appeared, with considerable fanfare, in 2000. The publicity claimed that the idea had come from the fact that indoor running tracks are suspended on springs. The boffins at Nike then borrowed from aerospace and Formula One technology to get those springs into our feet. But we didn't take to them - and this was worrying for Nike, because of what it implies about the way the market may be moving.
Following a brief early life as a low-cost alternative to Adidas, Nike - which started in 1972 - has built its business on the assumption that hi-tech trainers would always be considered cool, even if the technology was irrelevant to what customers were actually using the shoes for (shock absorbers being of limited value in the pub). The strategy has helped Nike become a company that does $10 billion of business every year worldwide and sells almost half of all the sneakers in the United States.
But the current fashion is for simpler, cleaner, old-school looks - a market driven in this country mainly by Puma and Adidas, and bolstered by a host of other brands including Converse and Reebok. Many of the companies that have performed well in recent years - Acupuncture, Vans, Skechers, Diesel - are out-and-out fashion brands, with only the merest acquaintance with physical activity. And in the last financial year Nike's shares plunged 21 per cent as US consumers (who account for half the company's revenue) turned towards other brands - Adidas, New Balance and, to a smaller degree, Puma.
In this country, Nike has been less comprehensively dominant (all the companies are cagey about market share, but independent figures in 2000 gave Nike 18.5 per cent of the market) while Adidas and Reebok, reflecting their European heritage, have been relatively stronger. (The same Mintel report gave them 13.5 per cent and 13 per cent respectively.) Puma is likely to be much more significant now - the company has seen a resurgence in the past eight years, has opened a flashy shop in Carnaby Street, and is constantly mentioned in conjunction with Nike and Adidas (and Converse in the trendier places) by retailers and industry watchers.
On both sides of the Atlantic, however, the story is the same: it's not easy for a global company whose trainers are on every high street and in every suburban mall, to remain fashionable. Young people like brands that are (a bit) rebellious, and Nike is perilously close to being the establishment.
Levi's faced a similar problem a few years ago, when jeans began to be something your dad, maybe even your granddad, wore. Levi's responded by producing garments that were difficult to wear and distributing them more exclusively. A shop called Cinch, just off Carnaby Street, sells nothing but Levi's; it is, in fact, a Levi's store. But it's not branded as such, and you won't see the jeans and jackets and denim skirts in there anywhere else. It appears that it is possible to grab back a bit of cutting edge - and the hope is that this has a trickle-down effect to playgrounds and suburban shopping centres, as Levi's becomes a covetable brand again.
Nike's chief executive, Phil Knight, took a decision in the mid-Eighties to turn the business into what he called 'a marketing-oriented company'. Nike stopped making anything and became a kind of shell, branding and distributing products. This must have looked like a good move at the time, when the idea of brands was beginning to exert the almost mystical power that it came to have in the Nineties. An assumption grew up that all products were the same, or easily could be, because technology made goods so easy to copy. Values, though, were different. You couldn't copy 'Just do it'.
The brand apostles thought anything and everything could be rebranded, up to and including Britain. Their opponents, whose arguments were popularised by Naomi Klein, thought brands were taking over our brains, and what were coming to be called 'the cultural industries' were simply a new way of gaining consent for inequality. In reality, both sides overstated the case. Brands weren't the answer to everything and sometimes they weren't even necessary: sushi has shot round the world without any branding at all. Customers are also involved in much more of a dialogue with brands than was realised a few years ago. The Nike Shox basketball shoe may have been endorsed by Vince Carter of the Toronto Raptors, but people didn't like the look of it. Richard Wharton sums up the widespread view of Shox: 'There's good design and there's bad design. And that's a gimmick.'
In focusing so heavily on technology and branding, it is arguable that Nike lost sight of design. If you ask Nike's corporate spokespeople what they think the company is about, the answer comes back almost bone-headedly: 'Everything we do is about sport and fitness,' says UK spokesman Simon Charlesworth. 'We sell through sport distribution outlets. We're not a fashion company.' If you point out to him that 80-90 per cent of trainers are bought for reasons of fashion, he says rather stiffly: 'We don't control who buys.'
For a long time, the strategy worked: bring out a hi-tech, flashy product, get a sporting superstar - Michael Jordan, or Ronaldo - to endorse it, and advertise it in a cool way. But young people are probably more sophisticated about celebrity endorsements than they used to be; they know, for example, that in 2000, Nike paid £300 million to ensure that Manchester United would wear its shirts and shorts for the next 13 years.
'People become desensitised if the only message you give them is that your trainers are the latest and greatest,' says Antonio Bertone, global director of brand management for Puma. 'The current generation has grown up with trainers: they already know they're supposed to make you run faster and jump higher.' Bertone, the man credited with changing perceptions of Puma, says the company has differentiated itself 'by being unafraid to mix things up: sport, fashion, lifestyle. As individuals, we are all becoming more and more aesthetically conscious, and I don't think that is going to change'.
It's a not dissimilar story at Adidas, the company founded by Adolph Dassler in Herzogenaurach in southern Germany in 1924 (his brother Rudolph fell out with him and set up a rival business across the Moselle, which he called Puma). With its history, Adidas was well-placed to capitalise on the trend for heritage shoes. Teenagers who would have bought skater brands - Vans, DCs, or even more obscure labels - now say these are only worn by eight-year-olds (and skaters). The teens and twentysomethings have moved on to retro shoes with slim soles and simple lines. Nike, which benefited from a very twentieth-century love of sport, fashion and technology, finds itself associated with the hi-tech trainer at the moment that it has become unfashionable.
In Cinch, the Levi's shop, I find several pairs of genuine antique trainers. They don't look worn and smelly; in fact, after days of walking around looking at people's feet (do other people do this all the time? It's incredible there aren't more accidents), they look beautiful. In size, Merlin Hardy has told me about sneaker heads who buy trainers by the bag load in every colour available, to keep in boxes rather than to wear, and then bring in their photo albums to show the staff. I wonder if I could be turning into one of these - but then I make the mistake of asking if they have a particular pair in my size, which of course they don't, because they're one-offs. If I want exclusivity but also choice, I need to go somewhere like Browns Focus, where, according to Yeda Yun, senior buyer, 'typically the companies will issue an old trainer in a new colour especially to us, like a [Nike] Air Force One or Air Force Two, or maybe in a new material. They are very, very exclusive.'
One way forward for brands that are seen to be too big and homogenised is to diversify. McDonald's, which recently posted a loss for the first time in its history, has bought Pret a Manger, a radically different kind of company. Coca-Cola still seems to be incredibly successful, but is potentially subject to the vagaries of fashion and perhaps, increasingly, to politicised consumption. A French entrepreneur, Tawfik Mathlouthi, is selling an Islamic cola, which he calls Mecca-Cola, in France and now, in Britain. With his promise to donate 10 per cent of profits to a Palestinian children's charity, Mathlouthi hopes to capitalise on anti-US feeling. (In a similar move, emails are circulating urging us to express opposition to war in Iraq by boycotting McDonald's.)
Coca-Cola hedges its bets by buying up or creating sub-brands, including, ironically enough, bottled water. But beyond this, and beyond segmenting distribution to cope with all the fragmented tribes and sub groups out there, as the trainer companies and Levi's are doing, Puma's Tony Bertone believes the future for the big brands is to get customers even more involved.
'Megabrands aren't offering what consumers want. They're more accessible, but there's no future for the brand that claims to be everything you will ever need, because how can it be that for everyone? What everybody's thinking about now is how to involve the consumer in a lot more decisions, to individualise the product. We haven't figured it out 100 per cent, but we know that there are a lot of people who want to control more about their lives, and the products they use.
'It already happens to an extent with cars. If you go to buy a Mini or a BMW, you can spend hours in the showroom detailing it. And Levi's had a pilot programme where you could bring in your jeans and an artist would customise them - but that was relatively limited because you had to come back and it had to be a certain day of the week.'
What does this mean for Puma specifically? Bertone won't say, but Nike is thinking along similar lines. One of the business's two newly appointed co-presidents, Mark Parker, recently said: 'The future for us isn't going to be, hey, here's better shoes, better apparel, better product. It's going to be a lot more dimensionalised... customisation and the personalisation of products and services are going to be a bigger and bigger part of our future.' He claimed the R&D team at Nike was working to 'explore things like smart products that feed into networks'.
Nike's Scorpion campaign, to coincide with last year's World Cup, had a nicely underground feel, despite very high production values; some of the ads looked as if they had been fly-posted. It culminated in a series of games for 11-16 year-olds around the world that attracted more than a million children. It is understood that their details were added to Nike's database, although the company refuses to comment.
Similarly, the Nike 10km London Run allowed the company to enter into a two-way conversation with its customers. Participants - all 25,000 of whom gave details to register, which were added to Nike's database - were offered the chance to try out new shoes. To collect their free, personalised T-shirts, they had to visit Niketown, where they were offered a 10 per cent discount on merchandise, including the shoes in which they had trained.
For the serious runner, customisation already exists. Oliver Roberts of Runner's World magazine says he has 12 different pairs, 'all different brands', from which he selects according to whether he's running cross-country, on the road, distance or sprinting. 'Unless you know what you're looking for, you can't tell the difference between a high-stability shoe and a lightweight racer.' He advises getting your running gait tested at a specialist shop before buying.
Now businesses are so focused on brand values, it's easy to see how they can make a false move and go out of fashion. But usually that happens because the products themselves lose their way. Marks & Spencer went awry by deciding it needed to be trendier but only taking a tentative half-step. Selfridges, by contrast, has just been through a phenomenally successful period, partly down to creating a buzz around the brand, with promotions like last year's Bollywood festival, and by getting Future Systems to design its new Birmingham store. But most importantly, under Vittorio Radice (now to go to M&S), it was clearly the best department store in London.
Brand consultant Simon Jameson cites Lego and Barbie - each with a relatively short life with any individual child - as brands that have found ways constantly to reinvent themselves for successive generations. But that, he says, is because they're fundamentally good ideas. Similarly, Rita Clifton, chairman of branding consultancy Interbrand, says Oil of Ulay was an ageing brand that has repositioned itself as attractive to young women. In part, this has been a branding exercise, but the product had to be right first, with new, lighter moisturisers. Gap lost its way, rather like M&S, when it tried to become too fashionable. Gap has returned to what it does best - stylish classics - and an advertising campaign that cleverly implies that Gap is for everyone, not in a homogenous, one-size-fits-all way, but for the opposite reason: that its clothes allow their wearers to express individuality.
Nike may be going through a bit of a rough patch now, but it wouldn't do to be too prematurely dismissive of the second generation Shox. The first Nike Airs didn't take off either. It's not easy to stay ahead of the game: Puma issues 500 different shoes a year and Bertone estimates that Nike must be producing around three times that. All of these have to be planned up to two years in advance. But the original Nike wasn't the Greek goddess of victory for nothing (her name wasn't, incidentally, pronounced to rhyme with 'Mike'): it is victory, competitiveness, energy, that the company is really selling - the values of capitalism, as much as of sport.
Meanwhile, back in the shoe shops, I am briefly tempted by the Nike Rift, a split-toed shoe (very fashionable last year) originally developed for the African Rift Valley runners, who would normally run in bare feet but needed shoes for the Olympics. At Foot Locker they tell me the in-thing is boxing boots, with very thin soles, 'like Italian pizza crusts'. A pair by Donna Karan look quite nice to me, but Richard Wharton has already warned me that if I wear Donna Karan I'll look like 'a twee little girlie'.
In despair, I ask what he wears, because he's been around since trainers became fashionable in the mid-Seventies. The usual story is that they were popularised by Liverpool supporters travelling abroad and finding rare Adidas and Lacoste. But Wharton started being obsessive about trainers at the same time 'and I never wore Adidas. We were wearing Converse in the South, and Diadora in the early Eighties'. He still wears Converse, or old-school Adidas. 'If you're 40-plus, anything too techie and you look like a knob.'
In the end, I buy a pair of old-fashioned looking Adidas, in two rather sweet shades of blue (doubtless making a mistake when I don't go for another pair, very similar, that only arrived in the shop this week). I'm still not sure if I've found myself. And then my 15-year-old says he doesn't know why I'm getting so worked up because it really doesn't matter what brand old people wear.
Who wears what
Aged 14-18 Hard-wearing Vans Maverick which come in bold designs; Prada Sport in eye-catching silver and blue; Gola Harriers - popular with teenage girls because they come in bright colours.
Aged 19-25 Nike Dunks - hi-tech skate shoes based on an Eighties design; Converse John Varvatos which are a designer update to the classic Converse high top trainer; DKNY Leanores - an elegant brown and cream shoe for young women.
Aged 26-35 Adidas Yohji Y3 is achingly hip footwear; Paul Smith's Target, a red retro design; Puma Sprint, white and pale blue running shoes for women that are too smart for the gym.
Aged 36+: Reebok Classic - functional trainers for ageing lads who now value comfort over style. New Balance Novo is the cute, colourful range originally marketed to US 'soccer moms'.