Nike Strategic Sales and Marketing Management

With the changing technology and dynamic business environments most organizations are facing challenges in planning and implementing teirsales and marketing strategies. As a result, organizations are restructuring their sales and marketing teams as well as developing strategic relationships with the stakeholders and major clients to boost their sales (Cravens, et al, 2011, p. According to Craven, et al, 2011 (p. 3), organizations are focusing on marketing strategies with great emphasize on strategic sales organization due to factors such as increasing customer sophistication, dynamic in customer requirements, need for different selling approaches and commoditization pressure. Nike is one of the multinational companies with the best marketing strategy that focusses on strategic sales and marketing management. S. Mark Parker being the CEO. The first products were tennis, wrestling, basketball, soccer and truck running shoes.

The company has expanded to global market and now it is the largest marketer of athletic foot wear in the world. NIKE, Inc. The portfolio brands of the company include Jordan Brand, NIKE Brand, Converse Brand and Jordan Brand. NIKE, Inc. , applies outsourcing manufacturing strategy since it does not have any manufacturing factory for its products. Most of the products are outsourced to reduce the cost. Changing nature of marketing and sales management NIKE, Inc. It was mailed to consumers for the first time in 1888(Ramnath 2016). Finally, telemarketing also known as telephone marketing refers to the exercise of sharing sales messages via mobile phones to persuade clients to purchase a product or service. Figure1:TV Spot as an example of traditional marketing Today marketing has taken modern trend with invasion of internet.

Most of the organizations have shifted from traditional marketing to online marketing with major focus on social media (Baker 2012). Companies use social platforms to market their products and services. Due to invention of new technologies NIKE shifted to modern marketing strategies like emotional branding marketing strategy and social media marketing. According to Schmitt, 1999 (p1), this marketing strategy utilizes an appeal to customers’ needs, aspirations and emotional state with an aim of building a particular brand. The recent Nike’s tagline “Just Do It,” has become a classic act of marketing (Schmitt 1999, p1). The emotional marketing strategy can also be referred to as experiential marketing since it emphasizes on consumer’s experience. According to Schmitt 1999 (5), unlike traditional marketing which assumes customers as rational decision –makers emphasizing on mainly the benefits, experiential marketing looks customers as emotional and rational human beings mainly concerned with gaining pleasure experiences (Schmitt 1999, p11).

Nike has several social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest. For each subsidiary brands and feed, Nike has created separate Twitter accounts. The main activity in their Twitter account is to respond to customer queries and granting the consumers connect with the corporation. Figure 4: Nike’s twitter account Figure 5: Nike advertisements on Twitter Nike’s Instagram account has more than 40 million followers. In 2016, Nike was the 19th among the most followed companies in Instagram account with more than 32. Nike has more than 4 million followers in Google+. Figure 7:Nike google+ advertising account Lastly, Nike has different Facebook pages created for each product category. For instance, there is a sport page where pictures and videos, particularly featuring company sponsored player and Nike products, are updated on daily basis.

Figure 8: Nike soccer fun page Figure 9:Nike’s Facebook photos Apart from Nike’s change in marketing and selling strategies due to technological advancements, the company has also diversified its product range. Nike has been venturing in different product portfolios to hedge on risk. Nike has been participating in corporate social responsibility by helping the needy, providing education and participating in community works in order to gain more customers and acquire customer support. Nike’s diversification has been aiming at achieving its long term aims, vision and mission. The company’s mission is to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. ’ Therefore, Nike is investing in a wide range of products in order tom meet the needs of every athlete.

According to Broi, et al (2016) athlete is anybody with a body. This is important to ensure that the company understands all their customer’s need and identify new opportunities to venture in. Structuring of the sales and marketing teams There are different organizational structures that a company can chose to structure its sales and marketing team. An Organization must be conscious while choosing the best organizational structure for its team since it has to choose something that can take it from one point to the other. Eric Devaney in his article “The Pros & Cons of 7 Popular Organizational Structures [Diagrams]” proposed 7 organizational structures that different organizations can use to structure their teams. According to Denaney (2017), choosing the best organizational structure requires consideration of the options such as span of control whether wide or narrow, chain of command whether long or short and the kind of decision making whether centralized or decentralized.

jpg?t=1522288805245&width=669&name=org-charts-mechanistic-vs-organic-blog. jpg Organic organizational structures are mostly complicated hence most organization opt for the traditional mechanic structures. Among the 7 organizational structures proposed by Devaney, the following are most preferred; functional organizational structures and divisional organizational structures based on product, geographical area and market. Functional Org Structure departmentalizes a company on the basis of job functions (Devaney 2017). In this structure different sales and marketing teams are grouped together in a one department based on job specialization. The advantage of product based division structure is that helps shorten the development cycles of products. However, this type of structure is difficult to scale, and may lead to product duplication as various divisions in an organization strive for autonomy. In divisional: Market-Based Org Structure each division in an organization is based on a particular industry, market or customer type.

This structure is applicable to organizations with unique products or services to particular market segment. However, divisions can lead to duplication of activities performed by more than one department. However, the structure has a limitation in managing converse operations. Nike decided to go international in order to satisfy regional and global market needs and preferences of athletic shoes, equipment and apparel. The company is known for its great sales turnover but sometimes it redraws products for innovation purposes. Nike is an innovative company that trends with the changing technology. Ansoff Matrix Ansoff Matrix can be defined as strategic marketing that explains growth of a business depending on whether the business markets existing or new products in existing or new markets. Figure 14: Boston matrix Stars are products with high growth rate and competitive advantage, cash cows are products of low growth, question marks products have low market share operating in markets of high growth while dogs are products having low market share in low-growth and unattractive markets.

Dogs are not worthy to invest in but can generate enough funds to break-even. Challenges in planning and implementing strategies NIKE is among the multinational companies which have been successful in planning and implementing their sales and marketing strategies. This is due to its large economies of scale. Its increase in sales volume and continued profitability can proof this. For instance, Nike has been facing challenges in maintaining its brand reputation while posting on social media. This challenge has been brought by the fact that there are different people posting on social media accounts on behave of Nike (Loana, et al 2016). This responsibility can fall to different people who may be experienced or inexperienced social media execs. Social media marketing strategy requires being keen of what to post on the social media as this can degrade company's brand.

Therefore, lack of a responsible person to tweet or post on anything on social media can lead to degradation of company's brand. In addition, Nike is a multinational company that markets its products to different countries with different cultures. This poses a great challenge in choosing what to post since some posts maybe en ethical (Leeflang, et al 2014, Pp. For instance, posting innerwear maybe unethical to some cultures. Furthermore, different countries are governed by different laws. Some laws may differ with home country laws thus making some posts illegal. In this case, they make sure that they get quality supplies at optimal cost. The buyer power depends on how easy the buyers drive prices down. Nike aims at having a few powerful buyers in order to be competitive (Porter 2008, Pp.

In order to achieve this, they focus on maintaining their brand. To outdo their rivalries, Nike focuses on product differentiation in social media. Nike uses product differentiation to outfit its competitors like the Adidas. The company posts few products which are well differentiated on social media. As a pattern, strategy entails the use of specific ploys to outfit a competitor. Nike maintains a specific pattern of posting their products on social media to avoid boring their customers (Leeflang, et al 2014, Pp. As a position, the strategy aims at locating a business in it right environment. Nike is a multinational company that needs to maintain a positive relationship with other countries. Therefore, the company needs to consider laws and restrictions of every country they operate in.

Organization's relationship with customers is very important since customers are the source of the organization's revenue. Customers keep an organization running. When an organization relates well to its customers it wins customers loyalty thus beating their competitors. Nike ensures a good relationship with its employees through training them, offering them appraisals and offering them conducive working environment. Maintaining positive relationship with employees is essential since it motivates employees thus improving their performance through extra commitment (Johnson & Auh 1998, pp. As a result, the overall productivity of the organization increases. Organization-customer relationships are also essential since they help minimize the level of competition in the market. An organization can maintain long time customer relationships through customer satisfaction, offering quality goods and services, retention and improving its efficiency (Johnson & Auh 1998, pp.

The behavioral perspective approach focuses on customer attachment with a service provider (Loana, et al 2016, Pp. The approach aims at maintaining positive altitudes to customers in order to build a good relationship. Trust, satisfaction and commitment approach aims at providing quality services to the customers. Lastly, network theory perspective requires the business relationship to be integrated into a network-system of lasting relationship instead of just buying and selling relationship. Another approach can be a managerial perspective approach that aims at making changes in the organization chart of a company in order to increase the importance of managing relationships between business partners. utilizes to maintain their customer relationships. It is also referred to as pull-marketing. Building customer relationships are essential since it helps in improving customer service.

This has a further effect on building customer loyalty as well as reducing customer churn. On the other hand, an organization needs to maintain good relationships with its employees for the smooth running of the business. Inc applies both planned and emergency strategy to build the relationship with its clients. Emergent strategies help an organization to grab unplanned opportunities and deal with unplanned challenges (Teece 2010, Pp. The corporate strategy aims at directing managers to ass add value to their stakeholders. This can be achieved through product diversity. However, in order to achieve the overall organizational goals a company needs initially planned strategy. Marketers are not only involved in the selling of company's products but also making the products known to consumers.

Marketing can take different forms; can be informed of advertisement, product design, promotions, discount etc. the most marketing activity is advertising that mostly makes company's products well known to the customers. Product design is the most effective form of marketing since it assists in matching the products and services of your company with the needs of the customers. Therefore, marketers are essential to an organization since; they avail organization's goods to the customers, matches organization's goods and services with the customer need through product design, promote company's products and services. This is because sales are the main source of revenue in an organization. Revenue is the key to organization's success since it contributes towards profitability of an organization. When an organization realizes its profits it starts achieving its goals.

Consequently, the organization achieves its strategic goals. Therefore, marketers are important personnel in an organization since they greatly contribute towards its success through promoting company products and services. Companies use social platforms to market their products and services. For instance, NIKE, Inc. , has a Face book fun where they can advertise their products and services by posting them for their followers to view. In the beginning, Nike emphasized on innovations on the design and manufacturing processes in order to remain competitive. However, Nike changed from being a production-oriented company to marketing centered since the 1990s, after a self-examination period brought on by business mishaps. The second problem is customer interruptions. When posting information on social media, you do it randomly without targeting specific individuals.

This can be frustrating to those who are not interested in such information. Another challenge is the problem of time management. Organizing what to be posted and what can attract individual attention requires much time. This part is responsible for gaining more content traffic via email marketing, blogging, SEO (search engine optimization), and PPC (pay-per-click marketing) (Chaffet & Ellis-Chadwick 2016, pp. Convert the prospects to leads- once the company gains more traffic on their website, they can convert them to an identifiable lead from an anonymous website. Close more sales. After converting the prospects into leads, the leads are closed. Closing leads mean converting to more sales. Available at: https://www. marketingweek. com/2012/06/21/nike- digital-more-valuable-than-traditional/ [Accessed 29 Mar. Peter, J. P. Schmitt, B. Experiential marketing.

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