A quotation from Chairman Phil:
"For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We've come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool."
quoted in Naomi Klein, _No Logo_, p.23.
This managerial attitude is 100 percent typical of big businesses that sell products to end users. Its roots lie squarely in the primary purposes and outcomes of corporate capitalism. Basic shopfloor labor productivity is astronomically higher than it was was 50 years ago, and it grows much faster than any of us appreciate, if you control for all the emcumbrances of marketing's backward penetration of product-design (see Baran and Sweezy on this). The massive productivity gains are split between marketing expenses and property incomes. The former facilitates the latter.
The Nike "air bag" and "shock" systems, by the way, were intentionally invented as marketing ploys. They serve no function to the shoe wearer. Nike has known this since day one of those "technologies."
The whole thing is a worsening downward spiral. The more stratified corporate capital renders the world, the more it needs to expand runaway marketing budgets. To do that, the search for ever-lower wages must continue. It's a second layer of capitalist logic added to the classic one. Meanwhile, the relatively affluent workers who buy most of the marketed stuff foot the financial tab. Marketing spending is an untaxed "cost of doing business."