Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor, brand consultant and an award-winning columnist. He is also the founder of the MiniMBA in Marketing, a ten-week training program for senior managers who missed or have forgotten their marketing fundamentals. Sign up here.
The news that Nike is replacing its iconic slogan should fill marketers with a significant degree of fear and loathing. There is, after all, an elephant’s graveyard of great slogans dumped by well-meaning but ill-advised brand managers searching for freshness, progress and a modern “look and feel”.
Few assets in marketing are as potent or distinctive as the words; “Just Do It.” It sits alongside Tiffany blue, Colonel Sanders and the Golden Arches in the pantheon of iconic brand codes. As Professor Jenni Romaniuk would say, the slogan combines the ultimate mix of fame (everyone knows it) and uniqueness (nobody mistakes it for anyone else).
And after 37 years and several billion dollars of advertising, the brand and its slogan are practically inseparable.
So why has Nike—in cahoots with its longtime agency Wieden+Kennedy Portland—decided to move to “Why Do It?” Its new 60-second ad, voiced by Tyler, the Creator, brings you face-to-face with a procession of intense sporting moments, each one posing the existential question: Why risk it, why put yourself through hell, why strive?
Why the shift away from Just Do It? Didn’t W+K invent the original? Isn’t Nike’s CEO Elliott Hill on a mission to return the brand to its original form? Isn’t Nike smarter than this?
The simple explanation for the switch to a new slogan is…
