Many Are Asking If Nike Still Matters. But It's the Wrong Question to Ask

Following a fall from the S&P 100 last month, Performance Marketing World asked whether Nike still matters. Big question.

I'd ask a different question: how did one brand ever get to matter that much?

I was born and bred in Nike. I spent over a decade inside the brand, and I still love it and admire what it did for sport. So I'm coming to this from affection, not criticism.

Nike used to set the benchmark for creativity, innovation, cultural relevance and style. It could start a conversation that had nothing to do with trainers. Does it carry the same weight today? Probably less. But before we try to answer that, I think there's a bigger question underneath it.

Is it worrying that ANY commercial brand can hold that kind of power?

We get uneasy when a handful of people own most of the financial capital. We should ask the same question about cultural capital. Do we want one commercial brand holding that much of it? Who decides what a generation finds aspirational, acceptable or cool, when the answer is a company accountable to its shareholders?

I don't have a neat answer. I've seen how much good concentrated reach can do. It let a brand put a woman athlete on a billboard in a country that wasn't showing women's sport, and make an argument to tens of millions of people in one evening. That's a real force for good. It also meant a commercial entity was quietly shaping what people considered normal. Both things are true, and we should be honest about holding both.

Was COVID just a logistics story?

The pandemic gets credited, or blamed, for big brands losing ground. In 2020 much of that shift was supply-driven. Big brands were out of stock, shoppers bought what was on the shelf, and many expected to win that share back once disruption eased.

The more interesting signal is the slower one. Share has been drifting away from the largest brands in many categories since the mid-2010s, long before anyone had heard of a lockdown. That points to something structural: social platforms becoming real distribution, direct-to-consumer working without retail, cheaper production, and advertising that a small business could afford. The room that let one brand speak to everyone at once has been taken apart, channel by channel.

Perhaps we are more tribal by design?

This is the question I find most compelling. I don't think people suddenly became more tribal. I think mass media stopped us acting on an instinct that is almost as old as we are. When there were only a handful of channels, we all shared a culture whether we chose it or not.

Think about how people have always belonged: the terrace, the parish, the family table, the local team. Lift the constraint and people go looking for smaller rooms. They want people who are like them, things that feel personal rather than recognisable, belonging rather than broadcast. Deeper, not bigger.

There's a caution in that, and I don't want to skip it. Smaller rooms can become echo chambers. A world of tribes is not automatically a healthier one. The same instinct that builds a community can also wall it off. That's a reason to think carefully about what we're building, not just that we're building smaller.

Why "cultural relevance" needs a rethink

Most of us have written "cultural relevance" as an objective at some point. But the phrase quietly assumes there is one culture to be relevant to. There isn't. The more honest ambition is to matter deeply to a specific group of people, and to accept that most people will never have heard of you.

That sounds like a smaller goal. I think it's a more durable one, and closer to how loyalty has always formed: locally, personally and through being earned.

So back to the question…does Nike still matter?

Probably less than it did, and the share price has been making that argument loudly enough without my help. But I think the more useful answer is that the category of thing Nike was has largely ceased to exist, and no amount of good work recreates the conditions that made it possible.

The room is gone. Everybody is in smaller rooms now, and they appear to prefer it.

Which is either a loss of something remarkable or the end of an anomaly, depending on how you feel about anomalies. I’m fairly sure it’s not a trend. Trends reverse. Constraints, once lifted, tend not to come back - and nobody has yet explained what would rebuild the room, or who would want to.