Marketing at Nike Essay -- Business Management Studies

Marketing at Nike The purpose of Nike is to meet actual and potential customer needs, doing this the ethical and legal way. Marketing is about businesses such as Nike, getting the product to the right sort of people at the right price in the right place, by using the right promotion. Nike must target the right product at the right audience, for example, it would be worthless aiming sports shoes to older people because they don’t exercise because they are to old and weak. For the marketing strategy to be successful Nike must follow the main principal of marketing, which is identifying and meeting actual and potential customer needs, however, to follow this principal the next principals listed must be followed: †¢ Understanding customer needs, †¢ Understand and keep ahead of the competition, †¢ Communicate effectively with its customers to satisfy customer expectations, †¢ Co-ordinate its functions to achieve marketing aims, †¢ Be aware of constraints on marketing activities. To understand customer’s needs, Nike must be aware of their customers changes in tastes and preferences, the business will have to keep up to date with what customers want. Incomes must also be considered. This is important because if an expensive product was aimed at adults who are on the poorer end of the market, and they basically couldn’t afford it then the product will not sell. Therefore, the price of the product will obviously have to compliment the target market in order for it to be successful. Nike needs to understand and keep ahead of competition (other sport brands e.g. Adidas and Gap); to do this Nike must have better marketing strategies and activities. In order to be the best competitor, Nike should have better products and more high quality products with excellent quality and must keep trying to improve them. Competition analysis can be used to check what their competitors are doing in order to beat them. For Nike to get their message across they will need to communicate with the customers. Nike must discover how to get the message across about the new product, this could be through several ways of advertising, such as, leaflets, radio stations or even television, Nike must chose the best advertising method to suit the target market and actually promote the product. Understanding customer needs is another of the activities Nike carries out. They do this by carryi... ...n as possible. This is very important to Nike as they say they don’t operate no sweat shop policy. As Nike manufactures many of their products abroad it needs to ensure all the rules and regulations are being followed abroad to. These have been concerns by pressure groups that suspects that Nike isn’t following their code of conduct abroad, in the factories that are producing their products, however their isn’t no sold evidence. Consumers are very concerned that products they are purchasing are produced ethically and when they start doubting businesses they may start to boycott and purchases alternative products form their competitors. Consumers have a right to know how the products are being made that they produce, there is also a UN agreement the ethical constraints for Nike are no child Labour or unfair pay, but the employees get  £8 a week and it would take them a whole month to buy on of the shirts they are producing without spending any of their money on food, water etc. some people would consider that to be unfair but compared to other local jobs they are being paid a lot more. Also hour’s Nikes employees were required to work are 14 hour shifts which Nike also still denies.