Strategic Marketing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words - 1

Strategic Marketing - Essay Example In the race to capture the lead in India for the most popular sportswear, Reebok has created the strongest showing in the market using their popularity to create new avenues of profit. Critically evaluate the strategic role of a sportswear manufacturer marketing function in achieving competitive advantage for the organisation. Support your answer with examples from the Reebok vs Nike case study. Nike and Reebok have entered into the sportswear manufacturing market through creating strong, identifiable brands that promote more than just the goods that they sell. Through powerful branding and globalization of their brand, they have made a mark on the industry as representative of lifestyles that include health and athletics. While both brands are distinctive, the Nike name and the iconic swoosh has outdistanced its competitors in recognizability. Through branding that creates attractive lifestyles, both brands have made their mark in the sportswear manufacturing industry. Nike’s most powerful advertising weapon is its brand. The Nike swoosh is a powerful pop culture icon. Slaughter and Rhodes suggest that â€Å"the effect of contemporary branding strategies is to push the ’host’ or sponsored culture into the background so that the brand emerges as the ’star’ (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004, p. 261). In order to support the brand, the swoosh is on every piece of product that is put out into the market. The founder of Nike, Phil Knight, suggested that it wasn’t the mission of Nike to sell shoes, but to make peoples lives better through sports and fitness. The image became so powerful that by the decade of the 90‘s the name of the company was no longer needed in order to create recognition (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004, p. 261). Nike has had some problems with proven claims of human rights violations in the factories that are subcontracted to produce their product. At the height of this, the Nike company decided to get ri d of the swoosh in order to allay the associations that the public was making to their problems in social responsibility issues. However, as Le Pla (2002) suggests â€Å"Changing an image in response to criticism makes sense. Dropping or reducing the visibility of a highly successful association does not† (p. 49). The brand icon has such a high recognition rate that it is foolish to abandon the brand icon, but to repair the image of the brand so that the associations are sanitized. In conjunction with their high visibility in branding, phrases have been associated with Nike in promoting their belief that every person is an athlete, therefore every person has the potential to be a consumer of their goods. A simple, yet powerful message was erected within the Nike mythology when the â€Å"Just Do It† campaign created a concept of the power of the athlete within everyone. The phrase suggested that no excuses would be allowed, that all goals should be achieved. The stateme nt had the power of a command, bringing an association of power to the athletic wear. The advertising premise, according to Nike, was â€Å" If you have a body, you are an athlete† (Nikeid 2011). The target audience for the Nike marketing concept is everyone without regard to age, health level, body shape, or sex. The original market was geared towards young athletes, but in this age the marketing has been