Many years ago, Converse were iconic, THE basketball sneaker.
Around 1984, Nike decided it wanted to enter the basketball market.
But Nike had a reputation as a running shoe, they weren’t even fashionable streetwear.
The fashionable sports clothing at that time was Adidas, rappers were wearing track bottoms and tops with three stripes down the side.
So Nike were third in the market: Converse had basketball, Adidas had street fashion.
But Nike decided to put fashion and basketball together.
They put all their money behind the youngest, hottest player in basketball, they even named their shoe after him: Air Jordan.
But the smartest thing they did was to make the shoe in red and black.
Because all basketball shoes were white. In fact NBA rules stated basketball shoes had to be white.
So Nike did something no one else dared to do, they questioned the rules:
“What happens if we break the NBA rule?”
No one had asked that before, they just meekly went along with the rule.
Nike found out that if they broke the rule during a televised game they’d have to pay a $5,000 fine.
Nike couldn’t believe it
“Are you kidding, you mean we get our shoes on Michael Jordan’s feet for the entire game, we look totally different from every other shoe out on the court.
Our shoes will stand out to millions of viewers, and it’s only going to cost us $5,000?”
Looked at in those terms, it was the media buy of the century.
A single prime-time ad would have cost around $80,000, they could buy 60 times that media for 5% of the cost.
So they put Michael Jordan in the shoes and the NBA went nuts, Nike paid the fine and prepared to do the same in the next game.
Nike built up the controversy as much as possible, feeding stories to the media, no-one knew how the NBA would react.
Thilo Kunkel, associate professor at Philadelphia’s Temple University, said: “Fans were looking to see if he would wear the forbidden shoes in the next game.
Cameras were on his shoes and the nation was talking about the Air Jordans.
Without the threat of a fine, there is no controversy. So it was the best money invested by Nike.”
The NBA were forced to ban the black and red Air Jordan shoes from TV games, which was just what Nike wanted: the excuse to run a TV commercial.
Their ad opened slowly panning down to Michael Jordan’s shoes as he bounces a basketball.
The VO says: “On Oct. 15, Nike created a revolutionary new basketball shoe.
But then the NBA threw them out of the game.
Fortunately, the NBA can’t keep you from wearing them. Air Jordans. From Nike.”
So Nike and Michael Jordan were seen as rebels fighting back against the establishment and, if you were a rebel, these were your shoes.
By manoeuvring the NBA into banning the shoes, Nike got them to do its advertising.
Suddenly Air Jordans were not only cool, they were the outlaw shoes.
Rappers had to be seen wearing them in their videos: Notorious B.I.G., Ice Cube, Jay Z, Kanye West.
It was like giving the finger to the establishment.
And guess which shoes all the cool kids everywhere had to be seen wearing.
Within 2 months Nike had sold $70 million of shoes and the brand just kept growing.
By 2022, one year’s total revenue for Air Jordan was over $5.1 billion.
(Nike even bought Converse, the shoes that had previously owned basketball.)
All that came from asking the question:
“What do the rules say we can’t do? Let’s do that.”