Our initial phase of partnership with Nike centered on resetting their global brand standards, elevating the consistency and aesthetic of their approach across consumer touchpoints. Everything was rooted in recentering Nike on sport—what Nike stands for.
While Nike excels at creating high-touch, major campaigns, most Nike consumer moments actually center around a number of smaller e-commerce experiences. We audited Nike’s consumer interfaces and the ways that they communicated across their funnel, transforming consumer experiences and moments across the calendar (back-to-school, holidays, and summer gear-up) into brand-right engagements that are all about sport.
For instance, a lot of the Nike e-commerce product photography was generic-feeling: clean, straightforward laydowns of clothes, or posed models in a white studio. If it weren’t for the swooshes, it could have belonged to The Gap. So we shifted focus from product-first to people-first narratives. Instead of only showing the shorts, devoid of human context, the shorts are seen on an athlete out on a run in a city.
Part of this workflow included the Nike After Dark tour, which is a half-marathon held in major cities around the world, run at night. We translated that into Los Angeles-specific city activations, identifying local stories and paths to connect and engage with a key market. We constructed editorial systems that connect human stories to products.
This is an entire re-thinking of the way Nike engages with editorial storytelling. By centering people’s stories that lead to product, instead of the other way around, every part of the brand down to a sale-alert email is charged with a new energy and purpose. The majority of what consumers mid-funnel see from Nike isn’t a national television campaign; it’s the smaller brand moments that, once aligned, make a massive impact at scale.
Laddering up from on-the-ground activations to high-level strategy, this reset is helping to drive Nike's brand rebound.
