Why Did Nike Do It?

Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor, brand consultant and an award-winning columnist. He is also the founder of the MiniMBA in Marketing, a ten-week training program for senior managers who missed or have forgotten their marketing fundamentals. Sign up here.

The news that Nike is replacing its iconic slogan should fill marketers with a significant degree of fear and loathing. There is, after all, an elephant’s graveyard of great slogans dumped by well-meaning but ill-advised brand managers searching for freshness, progress and a modern “look and feel”. 

Few assets in marketing are as potent or distinctive as the words; “Just Do It.” It sits alongside Tiffany blue, Colonel Sanders and the Golden Arches in the pantheon of iconic brand codes. As Professor Jenni Romaniuk would say, the slogan combines the ultimate mix of fame (everyone knows it) and uniqueness (nobody mistakes it for anyone else). 

And after 37 years and several billion dollars of advertising, the brand and its slogan are practically inseparable.

So why has Nike—in cahoots with its longtime agency Wieden+Kennedy Portland—decided to move to “Why Do It?” Its new 60-second ad, voiced by Tyler, the Creator, brings you face-to-face with a procession of intense sporting moments, each one posing the existential question: Why risk it, why put yourself through hell, why strive? 

Why the shift away from Just Do It? Didn’t W+K invent the original? Isn’t Nike’s CEO Elliott Hill on a mission to return the brand to its original form? Isn’t Nike smarter than this?

The simple explanation for the switch to a new slogan is Gen Z. In the clichéd handbook of demographic differences, this cohort are portrayed as questioners of tradition and prone to anxiety. 

Question everything

Frankly, I find such generalisations troubling. Nike obviously doesn’t. 

And tweaking its message to move from the Gen X pragmatism of “just” to the Gen Z existentialism of “why.”

A more persuasive argument for the new slogan is that this is not a new slogan at all. Rather, Nike is temporarily playing with the existing “Just Do It” phrase by turning it to “Why Do It?” because that’s what brands do when assets reach maturity.

Even the biggest brands have a limited palette of distinctive assets to paint their presence across the market. By using these assets—logos, slogans, pantones etc—judiciously and repeatedly across all tactical activities, marketers ensure that their brand is salient in store, or during an ad, or while surfing the web. 

That’s crucial because for all the talk of purpose, culture and influence, consumers aren’t really paying that much attention. 

And if your brand does not come to mind, all is lost. 

Icon or relic?

The initial role for distinctive assets—at least for the first few decades of their existence—is to make consumers think of the brand. That might seem obvious but it’s probably the single biggest sin of most American marketers whose complexity, ambition and creativity obscure the more fundamental challenge of ensuring consumers know that it’s you.

But as brands age and their distinctive assets acquire iconic status this challenge evolves. Brands like Nike face the additional test of not only coming to mind but also not looking old and dusty when they do. Everybody recognises icons, but they also revere them in way that celebrates their past more than their future.

It’s here that well established distinctive assets present mature brands with an opportunity for an all-important magic trick. When brands invert or temporarily alter their iconic assets the whole market notices. Headlines are made. Consumers do a cognitive double take. And in changing the brand asset the market recognises the original for its heritage while also seeing the new version and its emphasis on modernity. 

Change to stay the same

When Tiffany turned its famous blue to yellow a few years ago. When KFC dressed everyone from Reba McEntire to Jason Alexander as Colonel Sanders. Or when McDonalds bends its Golden Arches on freeway billboards to direct you to its nearest roadside restaurant. Each time the brand gains attention, achieves salience, reinforces heritage and modernises its image all in a single semiotic switcheroo. 

And Nike is doing the same thing with its “new” slogan. “Why Do It?” creates attention. It says something fresh and different. And the change in words, paradoxically, ensures everyone thinks about the original slogan all the more. This isn’t the reckless abandonment of one of marketing’s great slogans, it’s a clever tactical attempt to reinforce and rejuvenate it.

The lesson for marketers is a two-fold one. For the first 30, yes 30, years, your job is to establish distinctive brand assets and use them relentlessly in the pursuit of salience. But in middle age, just as the brand starts to get dusty, your best loved brand assets provide a perfect opportunity to refresh the brand through temporary transformation and inversion.

It’s a tricky brand management challenge. The first chapter is about consistency, repetition and respect. The second shifts to playfulness, creativity and change. Why do it? Because at a certain stage of a brand’s evolution it makes perfect marketing sense.