Competitive Advantage Of Nike

Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight started Nike Inc. in 1971, formally known as Blue Ribbon Sports. Bill Bowerman was a former track and field coach at the University of Oregon, and Phil Knight was a student-athlete at the University of Oregon. After numerous years of supplying under Blue Ribbon Sports, the two decided to enter the athletic shoe manufacturing business. The first employee of the company was Jeff Johnson, who helped them with branding what is known today as NIKE Inc.

subsidies. With such a grand scale of suppliers, Nike has achieved economies of scale. Nike ensures that their suppliers perform at the most competitive levels by implementing a performance measurement system known as the Manufacturing Index (MI). (Appendix) This index monitors quality, cost, delivery time and sustainability, and is frequently monitored each period. Suppliers who fall below a certain threshold – which they call the bronze level – have their contracts nullified.

Nike is a huge supplier if athletic shoes for the world these days. Philip H. Knight, the founder of this corporation came up with an idea of an athletic shoe at the track field of the University of Oregon.

Nike is the leading and yet renowned supplier of athletic apparel and shoes. The company controls close to 33% of the global athletic shoe market (Dogiamis & Vijayashanker,2009).Nike was founded by Bill Power and Phil Knight in 1962 as a Blue Ribbon Support and then was later on renamed to Nike in the year 1968 (Patrow,2003).The company supplies very high quality product in close to 100 countries with major markets being located in the U.S,U,K, Asia Pacific as well as in the Americas. The company has managed to attain its lead and legendary position via the application of innovative and yet attractive product design which is backed by quality production as well as well crafted marketing strategies.

When people think about shoes most of them have one superior shoe company come to mind, Nike. This dominant company was founded by Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman in 1964. Little do some know this company hasn’t always been on the top of shoe companies. When it first started off it was called Blue Ribbon Sports, but it was later changed to its iconic name Nike in 1973. Matter in fact it was started in the back of a car, and now it’s worth roughly around $15 million dollars. This change didn’t happen overnight. It took a lot of grit from Knight and Bowerman to achieve this elite status, which was obtained through two individuals with great ideas on how to reach it, and the grit to back their ideas up.

Nike was established in 1972 by Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight. These two men were visionaries. The goal for Nike was to carry on Bowerman’s legacy of innovative thinking by helping every athlete reach their goal or by creating lucrative business opportunities that would set the company apart from any competition. This included providing quality work environments for all who were employed by Nike.

As Nike is a multibillion dollar company, Nike has its own way of recruiting new potential employees. As the same time, there will be some weaknesses in its company’s recruitment and selection policies and procedures. Nike, Inc. has boundless chances to fuel beneficial development and further bolstering drive good fortune. Nike’s pioneers work consistently to guarantee Nike, Inc. understands its potential by rousing each one of its more than 40,000 workers to understand their potential. Human Resources experts at Nike, Inc. work as stewards of association adequacy, ability and change. The capacity attempts to guarantee that Nike, Inc. has capable, differing and comprehensive groups composed viably against Nike's greatest

Business level strategies are plans that a firm forms to describe and project how it intends to build a sustainable competitive advantage, over its competitors in a discrete market (Furrer, 2010, p. 1). These strategies have changed the nature of competition in industries, and paved way for further developments in product quality and cost. Business level strategies employed by Nike work mainly in two forms, that is, competitive strategies and corporative strategies (Furner, 2010, p. 1). By looking at the different business level strategies Nike has employed, this essay will explain how it has had such a massive impact in the Sports and Apparel industry it now leads.

The Nike name and trademark Swoosh introduced to the world in 1971, was established by college student, Phil Knight, getting his MBA at Stanford in the early '60s, Knight took a class with Frank Shallenberger. The semester-long project was to devise a small business, including a marketing plan. An underlying set of principles informs the Nike

Phil Knight and his track-and-field coach Bill Bowerman found one of the world’s well-known sports brand, Nike in 1964. With the beginning of Nike first “office” being the laundry room of Knight’s family home it has now become the biggest sports and fitness company in the world with international recognition. The vision statement of Nike as an organization was to think ahead in the long term and not to simply focus and be content with the present as described by Tom Clarke, chief executive of Nike.

The company I am presenting is Nike which was founded in 1965 by the athlete Phil Knight. Nike is a well known brand which is selling its products worldwide and has 36% of the market share.

Distribution – to make certain they are getting the latest most innovative products to customers quickly

The important part of the success was due to the far-sight of Nike's management team. Nike's CEO, who was a marathoner and knew what runners wanted for their shoes, had made a very basic strategy work; "make the products that fit their consumers' needs". Examples of great decision making are:

There are numerous definitions of competitive strategy; whether, it was defined by a scholar, a textbook, or a dictionary source, it is not the same. A source may refer to this subject as a competitive strategy or a competitive advantage. Therefore, this subject is difficult to understand and then apply to a company. The Five Generic Competitive Strategies that Michael E. Porter developed are not really five strategies, more like five with subsets under them. Nike does not fit neatly into a specific strategy. The first factor within the competitive strategy as described in the Essentials of Strategic Management textbook is a broad target market or a narrow target market. The second factor considers

Nike began as Phil Knight’s semester-long project to develop a small business, which included a marketing plan. This project was part of Phil Knight’s MBA course at Stanford University in the early 1960s. Phil Knight had been a runner at the University of Oregon in the late 1950s. His idea for his project was to develop high quality running shoes. He thought that high quality/low cost products could be produced in Japan and then shipped to the United States to be sold at a profit. His professor thought that Knight’s idea was interesting, but not much more than a project.