Background
This project was developed as part of a MBA Capstone project that was accompanied by a 50+ page paper with that detailed Nike, landscape analysis, financials, etc. Nike is easily one of the most recognizable brands in the world. In the past 50 years, Nike has become the leader in global sports apparel manufacturing and retail. The Nike brand licenses it’s name for global professional and college sports teams, including the National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA), the Olympics and other professional sports organizations.
Project Goals
The goal of this project was to develop an intrepreneurial business opportunity for Nike and produce a business plan for the internal Nike leadership audience. The business idea developed was for Nike to create a streaming platform for their existing Nike Training Club (NTC) app and scale with Nike branded content — docuseries, health, fitness, etc. This app, at the time, offered training videos, but did not allow users to cast onto a larger screen.
Revolutionary idea. No retailer is doing this. If done well, others will try to follow, and they may not be as successful because the Nike brand and its consumers are unique.
Nike x Billie Eilish AF1 Low
“78% of Millennials would choose to spend money on a desirable experience over buying physical goods” (Edelman, 2018)
What the channel solves
The Nike Training Club (NTC) app offers free home or gym workouts, with the option to upgrade to premium videos with fitness coaches and wellness information.
The NTC app most significant complaint is that users cannot access or stream this content on their televisions, they are stuck with a smaller screen.
The Nike Streaming Channel would allow users to upgrade their NTC plan to allow for viewing on their TV and give access to a wider variety of content created by Nike.
The NTC app has been downloaded by over 30 million users—this is a built-in audience (Aragones, n.d).
Clarifying channel contents
Nike will be able to control their narrative.
Collect more data.
Provide users content that will bring in monthly or annual subscription fees.
The contents of the channel are fitness, the utilization of celebrity trainers, docuseries-style programming—Michael Jordan’s Last Dance, for example, was trending on Twitter at the time of this research.
Additionally, Nike will be able to provide content from their athletic-celebrity endorsers to talk current events and provide commentary on hot button social justice issues.
Lastly, Nike will be able to offer transparency into their sustainability and corporate civic efforts across their organization. These content categories are what their belief-driven audience cares most about.
“It’s not all about the immediate transaction.” says Wendy Liebmann, CEO of retail consultancy WSL Strategic Retail, it’s about asking, “How do I engage with you and bring you into my community?’(Novy-Williams, 2018).
SPOILER ALERT, Nike and Netflix announced partnership Dec 2022.
“To expand access to sport for all athletes, Nike is launching an initiative with Netflix to offer Nike Training Club (NTC) content for Netflix members to stream starting December 30, 2022.” (Nike)
Challenges / Lessons Learned
The research for this initiative was challenging for a few reasons, such as, not having first hand insight into Nike as an employee. This was a hypothetical intrepreneurial opportunity, the lack of transparency into real-time initiatives and discussions was a blind spot.
The financials were another blind spot, I took several liberties with what numbers were publicly available. Finding out start up costs for streaming channels as well as what types of roles would be required was a challenge and unfamiliar to me at that time.
Retrospective
Looking back I would focus on building this as a strategic partnership, which I alluded to during the contingency planning, I began to see an easier or at least less risky path. This is exactly what is occurring now with Nike and Netflix's partnership, as of December 2022, Nike and Netflix have announced that they placing their Nike Training Club program on the platform.
To learn more about this you can listen to the presentation in full below. If you have any questions, please reach out.
Full length video presentation.
