by Naomi Klein
But that was beside the point. Before the race began, Nike held a press conference at its Olympic headquarters, catered the event with Kenyan food and beer and showed reporters a video of the Kenyans encountering snow for the first time, skiing into bushes and falling on their butts. The journalists also heard accounts of how the climate change was so dramatic that the Kenyans’ skin cracked and their fingernails and toenails fell off, but “now,” as Boit said, “I love snow. Without snow, I could not do my sport.” As the Tampa Tribune of February 12, 1998, put it, “They’re just two kooky Kenyans trying to make it in the frozen tundra.”
It was quintessential Nike branding: by equating the company with athletes and athleticism at such a primal level, Nike ceased merely to clothe the game and started to play it. And once Nike was in the game with its athletes, it could have fanatical sports fans instead of customers.
Step 2: Destroy the Competition
Like any competitive sports player, Nike has its work cut out for it: winning. But winning for Nike is about much more than sneaker wars. Of course Nike can’t stand Adidas, Fila and Reebok, but more important, Phil Knight has sparred with sports agents, whose individual greed, he claims, puts them “inherently in conflict with the interests of athletes at every turn”;26 the NBA, which he feels has unfairly piggybacked on Nike’s star-creation machin ery;27 and the International Olympic Committee, whose elitism and corruption Knight derided long before the organization’s 1999 bribery scandals.28 In Nike’s world, all of the official sports clubs, associations and committees are actually trampling the spirit of sports — a spirit Nike alone truly embodies and appreciates.
So at the same time as Nike’s myth machine was fabricating the idea of Team Nike, Nike’s corporate team was dreaming up ways to play a more central role in pro sports. First Nike tried to unseat the sports agents by starting an agency of its own, not only to represent athletes in contract negotiation but also to develop integrated marketing strategies for its clients that are sure to complement —not dilute —Nike’s own branding strategy, often by pushing its own ad concepts on other companies.
Then there was a failed attempt to create —and own — a college football version of the Super Bowl (the Nike Bowl), and in 1992, Nike did buy the Ben Hogan golf tour and rename it the Nike Tour. “We do these things to be in the sport. We’re in sports —that’s what we do,” Knight told reporters at the time.29 That is certainly what they did when Nike and rival Adidas made up their own sporting event to settle a grudge match over who could claim the title “fastest man alive” in their ads: Nike’s Michael Johnson or Adidas’s Donovan Bailey. Because the two compete in different categories (Bailey in the 100-meter, Johnson in the 200), the sneaker brands agreed to split the difference and had the men compete in a made-up 150-meter race. Adidas won.
When Phil Knight faces the inevitable criticism from sports purists that he is having an undue influence on the games he sponsors, his stock response is that “the athlete remains our reason for being.”30 But as the company’s encounter with star basketball player Shaquille O’Neal shows, Nike is only devoted to a certain kind of athlete. Company biographer Donald Katz describes the tense meeting between O’Neal’s manager, Leonard Armato, and Nike’s marketing team:
Shaq had observed the explosion of the sports-marketing scene (“He took sports-marketing courses,” Armato says) and the rise of Michael Jordan, and he’d decided that rather than becoming a part of several varied corporate marketing strategies, an array of companies might be assembled as part of a brand presence that was he. Consumer products companies would become part of Team Shaq, rather than the other way around. “We’re looking for consistency of image,” Armato would say as he began collecting the team on Shaq’s behalf. “Like Mickey Mouse.”
The only problem was that at Nike headquarters, there is no Team Shaq, only Team Nike. Nike took a pass and handed over the player many thought would be the next Michael Jordan to Reebok —not “Nike material,” they said. According to Katz, Knight’s mission “from the beginning had been to build a pedestal for sports such as the world had never seen.”31 But at Nike Town in Manhattan, the pedestal is not holding up Michael Jordan, or the sport of basketball, but a rotating Nike sneaker. Like a prima donna, it sits in the spotlight, the first celebrity shoe.
Step 3: Sell Pieces of the Brand As If It Was the Berlin Wall
Nothing embodies the era of the brand like Nike Town, the company’s chain of flagship retail outlets. Each one is a shrine, a place set apart for the faithful, a mausoleum. The Manhattan Nike Town on East Fifty-seventh Street is more than a fancy store fitted with the requisite brushed chrome and blond wood, it is a temple, where the swoosh is worshiped as both art and heroic symbol. The swoosh is equated with Sports at every turn: in reverent glass display cases depicting “The definition of an athlete;” in the inspirational quotes about “Courage,” “Honor,” “Victory” and “Teamwork” inlaid in the floor boards; and in the building’s dedication “to all athletes and their dreams.”
I asked a salesperson if there was anything amid the thousands of T-shirts, bathing suits, sports bras or socks that did not have a Nike logo on the outside of the garment. He racked his brain. T-shirts, no. Shoes, no. Track suits? No.
“Why?” he finally asked, sounding a bit hurt. “Is somebody allergic to the swoosh?”
Nike, king of the superbrands, is like an inflated Pac-Man, so driven to consume it does so not out of malice but out of jaw-clenching reflex. It is ravenous by nature. It seems fitting that Nike’s branding strategy involves an icon that looks like a check mark. Nike is checking off the spaces as it swallows them: superstores? Check. Hockey? Baseball? Soccer? Check. Check. Check. T-shirts? Check. Hats? Check. Underwear? Check. Schools? Bathrooms? Shaved into brush cuts? Check. Check. Check. Since Nike has been the leader in branding clothing, it’s not surprising that it has also led the way to the brand’s final frontier: the branding of flesh. Not only do dozens of Nike employees have a swoosh tattooed on their calves, but tattoo parlors all over North America report that the swoosh has become their most popular item. Human branding? Check.
The Branded Star
There is another reason behind Nike’s stunning success at disseminating its brand. The superstar athletes who form the building blocks of its image —those creatures invented by Nike and cloned by Adidas and Fila — have proved uniquely positioned to soar in the era of synergy: they are made to be cross-promoted. The Spice Girls can make movies, and film stars can walk the runways but neither can quite win an Olympic medal. It’s more practical for Dennis Rodman to write two books, star in two movies and have his own television show than it is for Martin Amis or Seinfeld to play defense for the Bulls, just as it is easier for Shaquille O’Neal to put out a rap album than it is for Sporty Spice to make the NBA draft. Only animated characters — another synergy favorite —are more versatile than sports stars in the synergy game.
But for Nike, there is a downside to the power of its own celebrity endorsers. Though Phil Knight will never admit it, Nike is no longer just competing with Reebok, Adidas and the NBA; it has also begun to compete with another brand: its name is Michael Jordan.
In the three years before he retired, Jordan was easing away from his persona as Nike incarnate and turning himself into what his agent, David Falk, calls a “superbrand.” He refused to go along when Nike entered the sports-agent business, telling the company that it would have to compensate him for millions of dollars in lost revenue. Instead of letting Nike manage his endorsement portfolio, he tried to build synergy deals between his various sponsors, including a bizarre attempt to persuade Nike to switch phone companies when he became a celebrity spokesperson for WorldCom.32 Other highlights of what Falk terms “Michael Jordan’s Corporate Partnership Program” include a WorldCom commercial in which the actors are decked out in Oakley sunglasses and Wilson sports gear, both Jordan-endorsed products. And, of course, the movie Space Jam —in which the basketball player starred and
which Falk executive-produced —was Jordan’s coming-out party as his own brand. The movie incorporated plugs for each of Jordan’s sponsors (choice dialogue includes “Michael, it’s show time. Get your Hanes on, lace up your Nikes, grab your Wheaties and Gatorade and we’ll pick up a Big Mac on the way!”), and McDonald’s promoted the event with Space Jam toys and Happy Meals.
Nike had been playing up Jordan’s business ambitions in its “CEO Jordan” commercials, which show him changing into a suit and racing to his office at halftime. But behind the scenes, the company has always resented Jordan’s extra-Nike activities. Donald Katz writes that as early as 1992, “Knight believed that Michael Jordan was no longer, in sports-marketing nomenclature, ‘clean.’”33 Significantly, Nike boycotted the co-branding bonanza that surrounded Space Jam. Unlike McDonald’s, it didn’t use the movie in tie-in commercials, despite the fact that Space Jam is based on a series of Nike commercials featuring Jordan and Bugs Bunny. When Falk told Advertising Age that “Nike had some reservations about the implementation of the movie,”34 he was exercising considerable restraint. Jim Riswold, the longtime Nike adman who first conceived of pairing Jordan with Bugs Bunny in the shoe commercials, complained to The Wall Street Journal that Space Jam “is a merchandising bonanza first and a movie second. The idea is to sell lots of product.”35 It was a historic moment in the branding of culture, completely inverting the traditionally fraught relationship between art and commerce: a shoe company and an ad agency huffing and puffing that a Hollywood movie would sully the purity of their commercials.
For the time being at least, a peace has descended between the warring superbrands. Nike has given Jordan more leeway to develop his own apparel brand, still within the Nike empire but with greater independence. In the same week that he retired from basketball, Jordan announced that he would be extending the JORDAN clothing line from basketball gear into lifestyle wear, competing directly with Polo, Hilfiger and Nautica. Settling into his role as CEO — as opposed to celebrity endorser —he signed up other pro athletes to endorse the JORDAN brand: Derek Jeter, a shortstop for the New York Yankees and boxer Roy Jones Jr. And, as of May 1999, the full JORDAN brand is showcased in its own “retail concept shops” —two in New York and one in Chicago, with plans for up to fifty outlets by the end of the year 2000. Jordan finally had his wish: to be his own free-standing brand, complete with celebrity endorsers.
The Age of the Brandasaurus
On the surface, the power plays between millionaire athletes and billion-dollar companies would seem to have little to do with the loss of unmarketed space that is the subject of this section. Jordan and Nike, however, are only the most broad strokes, manifestations of the way in which the branding imperative changes the way we imagine both sponsor and sponsored to the extent that the idea of unbranded space — music that is distinct from khakis, festivals that are not extensions of beer brands, athletic achievement that is celebrated in and of itself —becomes almost unthinkable. Jordan and Nike are emblematic of a new paradigm that eliminates all barriers between branding and culture, leaving no room whatsoever for unmarketed space.
An understanding is beginning to emerge that fashion designers, running-shoe companies, media outlets, cartoon characters and celebrities of all kinds are all more or less in the same business: the business of marketing their brands. That’s why in the early nineties, Creative Artists Agency, the most powerful celebrity agency in Hollywood, began to represent not just celebrity people, but celebrity brands: Coke, Apple and even an alliance with Nike. That’s why Benetton, Microsoft and Starbucks have leapfrogged over the “magalog” trend and have gone full force into the magazine publishing business: Benetton with Colors, Microsoft with the on-line zine Slate and Starbucks with Joe, a joint venture with Time Inc. That’s why teen sensation Britney Spears and sitcom character Ally McBeal each have their own line of designer clothing; why Tommy Hilfiger has helped launch a record label; and rapper Master P has his own sports agency business. It’s also why Ralph Lauren has a line of designer household paints, Brooks Brothers has a line of wines, Nike is set to launch a swooshed cruise ship, and auto-parts giant Magna is opening up an amusement park. It is also why market consultant Faith Popcorn has launched her own brand of leather Cocooning armchairs, named after the trend she coined of the same name, and Fashion Licensing of America Inc. is marketing a line of Ernest Hemingway furniture, designed to capture the “brand personality” of the late writer.36
As manufacturers and entertainers swap roles and move together toward the creation of branded lifestyle bubbles, Nike executives predict that their “competition in the future [will] be Disney, not Reebok.”37 And it seems only fitting that just as Nike enters the entertainment business, the entertainment giants have decided to try their hand at the sneaker industry. In October 1997, Warner Brothers launched a low-end basketball shoe, endorsed by Shaquille O’Neal. “It’s an extension of what we do at retail,” explained Dan Romanelli of Warner Consumer products.
It seems that wherever individual brands began — in shoes, sports, retail, food, music or cartoons —the most successful among them have all landed in the same place: the stratosphere of the superbrand. That is where Mick Jagger struts in Tommy Hilfiger, Steven Spielberg and Coke have the same agent, Shaq wants to be “like Mickey Mouse,” and everyone has his or her own branded restaurant —from Jordan to Disney to Demi Moore to Puffy Combs and the supermodels.
It was Michael Ovitz, of course, who came up with the blueprint for the highest temple of branding so far, one that would do for music, sports and fashion what Walt Disney long ago did for kids’ cartoons: turn the slick world of television into a real-world branded environment. After leaving Creative Artists Agency in August 1995 and being driven out as president of Disney shortly after, Ovitz took his unprecedented $87 million golden handshake and launched a new venture: entertainment-and sports-themed mega malls, a synthesis of pro sports, Hollywood celebrity and shopping. His vision is of an unholy mixture of Nike Town, Planet Hollywood and the NBA’s marketing wing —all leading straight to the cash register. The first venture, a 1.5-million-square-foot theme mall in Columbus, Ohio, is scheduled to open in the year 2000. If Ovitz gets his way, another mall, planned for the Los Angeles area, will include an NFL football stadium.
As these edifices of the future suggest, corporate sponsors and the culture they brand have fused together to create a third culture: a self-enclosed universe of brand-name people, brand-name products and brand-name media. Interestingly, a 1995 study conducted by University of Missouri professor Roy F. Fox shows that many kids grasp the unique ambiguities of this sphere intuitively. The study found that a majority of Missouri high-school students who watched Channel One’s mix of news and ads in their classrooms thought that sports stars paid shoe companies to be in their comercials. “I don’t know why athletes do that —pay all that money for all them ignorant commercials for themselves. Guess it makes everyone like ’em more and like their teams more.”38
So opined Debbie, a ninth-grader and one of the two hundred students who participated in the study. For Fox, the comment demonstrates a disturbing lack of media literacy, proof positive that kids can’t critically evaluate the advertising they see on television. But perhaps these findings show that kids understand something most of us still refuse to grasp. Maybe they know that sponsorship is a far more complicated process than the buyer/ seller dichotomy that existed in previous decades and that to talk of who sold out or bought in has become impossibly anachronistic. In an era in which people are brands and brands are culture, what Nike and Michael Jordan do is more akin to co-branding than straight-up shilling, and while the Spice Girls may be doing Pepsi today, they could easily launch their own Spice Cola tomorrow.
It makes a good deal of sense that high-school kids would have a more realistic grasp of the absurdities of branded life. They, after all, are the ones who grew up sold.
Top: Virgin’s Richard Branson, the rock-and-roll CEO. Bottom: Revolution
Soda Co.’ consumable Che.
CHAPTER THREE
ALT. EVERYTHING
The Youth Market and the Marketing of Cool
It’s terrible to say, very often the most exciting outfits are from the poorest people.
—Designer Christian Lacroix in Vogue, April 1994
In our final year of high school, my best friend, Lan Ying, and I passed the time with morbid discussions about the meaninglessness of life when everything had already been done. The world stretched out before us not as a slate of possibility, but as a maze of well-worn grooves like the ridges burrowed by insects in hardwood. Step off the straight and narrow career-and-materialism groove and you just end up on another one —the groove for people who step off the main groove. And that groove was worn indeed (some of the grooving done by our own parents). Want to go traveling? Be a modern-day Kerouac? Hop on the Let’s Go Europe groove. How about a rebel? An avant-garde artist? Go buy your alterna-groove at the secondhand bookstore, dusty and moth-eaten and done to death. Everywhere we imagined ourselves standing turned into a cliché beneath our feet —the stuff of Jeep ad copy and sketch comedy. To us it seemed as though the archetypes were all hackneyed by the time our turn came to graduate, including that of the black-clad deflated intellectual, which we were trying on at that very moment. Crowded by the ideas and styles of the past, we felt there was no open space anywhere.
