Marketing Alchemy: Unveiling the Success of Nike's Air Max 1 Through Advertising and Sales Promotion

Introduction

I have come across advertisements all through my life and still do, daily. Initially, they seemed to me like short forms of entertainment. Through my educational experience, I realized that they performed a more significant role in their various industries. I now understand that advertising is the procedure of broadcasting a product or service to promote a brand (Percy & Rosenbaum, 2016). This understanding got me thinking of the most successful companies as a consequence of advertisement, and the Nike cooperation came to mind.

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Nike is the first brand for sporting paraphernalia globally, and the 14th most valuable company in the world (Flynn, 2015). I was, however, particularly drawn to the Nike Air Max 1, which is Nike's most successful product. I have learned through my course about sales promotion, a component of advertising that entails the expression of the value and quality of a product or service. Therefore, in this case, given the type of Nike advertisements that I have seen and their success, I deduce that the Nike Air Max 1's success is a result of the product's sales promotion.

Therefore, I chose to focus on the individual responsible for sales promotion: the product marketing manager, and his particular role in achieving this commercial success.

The Role of the Marketing Manager in Sales Promotion

A product marketing manager's task is the primary responsibility of expressing a product's value to the intended market to promote the product (Kelly, 2019). To achieve that the product manager is required to create content and apply marketing tools that effectively promote the product's sales.

In the context of the Nike Corporation and the Nike Air Max 1, the product marketing manager has succeeded in promoting the product. By watching advertisements on the Nike Air Max 1, I realized that the theme expresses the product as more than just a pair of sports shoes by expressing motivation towards athletic excellence. The sales promotion strategy applied motivated me to buy these sports shoes based on the idea that I was buying more than just a pair of sneakers. Therefore, on a short-term basis, the Nike Air Max 1's product marketing manager has facilitated the creation of content that promotes the product's sales through motivation to influence sales.

Difference between Advertising and Sales Promotion of the Nike Air Max 1

Based on my understanding of the product marketing manager's function in promoting the Nike Air Max 1's sales, I realized that there is a difference between advertising and sales promotion. Therefore, I sought to understand the difference between these two marketing concepts and how each of them could have affected the sales of the product.

Based on their definitions, advertising is a more permanent marketing approach, while sales promotion is temporary. Therefore, advertising seeks to promote the Nike brand to no specific market but the general public, while sales promotion targets a particular market for a specific period. Thus, advertising did not promote the Nike Air Max 1 product's direct sales, but it created the foundation for its exposure.

The other difference is their target objectives. I understood that Nike's advertising promoted the Nike brand, while the sales promotion promoted the Nike Air Max as a Nike product. The goal of advertising is to promote general sales, while a sales promotion aims to sell a particular product. From this concept, I understood that advertising might not directly boost a specific product's sales through generalization, but it enables the organization's growth. On the other hand, sales promotion does not directly contribute to the company's growth, but it generates sales for a specific product.

Conclusion

In conclusion, my research on the Nike Company's sales promotion and advertising strategy, given its current success, revealed a significant concept concerning these two marketing approaches. That is, sales promotion and advertising are fundamental aspects of marketing that function symbiotically to promote the sales of a product and the growth of a company.

References

Flynn, P. (2015). Nike Marketing Strategy: A Company to Imitate. Business Publishers.

Kelly, A. (2019). The Product Manager Role. In the art of agile product ownership (pp. 97-101). Apress, Berkeley, CA.

Percy, L., & Rosenbaum-Elliott, R. (2016). Strategic advertising management. Oxford University Press.