Nike Core Competency

The Mini Case manifests that Nike’s core competency is to create heroes. Nike spends over $1 billion per year sponsoring athletes, and transfer its brand image via celebrity effect. Nike sponsoring athletes who with huge potential, or even from disadvantaged backgrounds (Rothaemel, 2015). Those people’s success stand for “impossible to possible”, Nike impressing its customers that everyone can become a hero by these inspiring stories. From 1976 to 1983, Nike focused on product innovation, and launched the Air shoe which significantly contributed to a reversal in declining sales. From 1984 to 1996, Nike signed the endorsement contract with Michael Jordan, thus shaping the brand image of the professional basketball shoes, surpass Adidas and Puma as a leading brand in the industry (Kincade, 2010). The success of Nike air shoe let Nike acknowledge, design and promotion is the most powerful weapon in the competition. In order to concentrated on its core competency in the design and promotion, Nike didn 't go to

It helps Nike to increase its economic value creation. For example, Appendix C shows that Nike’s pre-tax income continually increased, and attained $4,205 million in 2015 (Nike, 2015).

Nike’s ability in celebrity endorsements and product design is rare. No other sports brand in the world, has such a large number of celebrities from sports using its product in public. Moreover, Nike’s air cushion technology innovation always maintained a leading and monopoly (Nike, 2015). Thus, this resource is not only valuable but also rare.

Nike’s celebrity endorsements might be costly to imitate for new comers, but for exist competitors it is not difficult to imitate. For example, Adidas will pay over $70 million a year to extend its sponsorship deal with the German soccer association (Alawsat, 2016). Thus, Nike need to consider how to sustain its competitive