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By Root 1406 0

Perfumes are sold almost entirely via designer labels. Calvin Klein nearly went bust selling fashion apparel, but his three consecutive lines of perfume—each reflecting its time—were commercial triumphs. Obsession, mirroring the hedonistic eighties; Eternity, following the new family values; and most recently, Escape, echoing tired yuppies in search of a way out, all earned major success in a market crowded with newcomers (over 120 new perfumes each year). Here is the case where a rose is not as sweet by any other name, where it is the brand and not the scent that brings in the profits.

Tie-ins and the licensing of spin-off merchandise from blockbuster films like Jurassic Park and The Lion King (as well as Oscar winners like Forrest Gump) not only make fortunes for the companies that own them (Disney expects a billion dollars from Lion King licensing) but blur the lines between domains once thought to be distinct. The Disney marketing program “connects its book, movie, recording and theme park units” with a synergy no other company can rival.21

Disney is the obvious champion of synergy, but the footwear business also offers an altogether apt, if rather less explicit, example of the power of name and trademark over product and of the associational psychology that attaches the chic glamor of the woman’s movement and youth volunteerism to for-profit merchandising. Sneakers are apparel items and Nike is a novice in the shoe business (here only since 1972), so it has had to capture its $4 billion share of the market not by selling shoes but by cultivating trademark and brand loyalty that depends on lifestyle choices and the images associated with them. In search of effective wholistic marketing strategies, Nike has consulted Ovitz’s Creative Artists Agency dream factory. Ovitz told Nike CEO Phil Knight something Knight presumably already knew: that “sports is bigger than entertainment now.”22 Humankind walked the globe for millennia without the specialty items developed in the last few decades for professional athletes. Today when 40 percent of all shoes sold are already athletic shoes, if Nike, Adidas, and Reebok have their way, no one will walk at all without their products; and this will be a consequence of a lifestyle choice arising out of the manipulation of emotions linked to sports and winning rather than to the satisfaction of needs linked to walking and shoes.

Nike started up just over twenty years ago and sold a little over $3 million in sneakers to Oregon consumers, many of whom (Nike now gleefully reports) thought the logo said “Mike.” Today the company does better than $3.5 billion in sales worldwide. “We are not a shoe company,” explains Liz Dolan, Nike’s corporate communications vice president, “we are a sports company.”23 Nike CEO Phillip H. Knight is even more forthright: “How do we expect to conquer foreign lands?” he asks in the 1992 Annual Report. “The same way we did here. We will simply export sports, the world’s best economy.”24 Well, not exactly sports and not just sports, but the image and ideology of sports: health, victory, wealth, sex, money, energy—don’t name it, “just do it.”

If actual athletes were the only consumers of athletic shoes, there would be far too few of them to keep sales perking in the billions round the world, so the object becomes to make those who watch athletics believe that in wearing Nikes they too are athletes, even if they never get up out of the armchairs from which they watch the world’s most famous Michael sail across the heavens in his Air Jordans. Mr. Knight is pretty blunt about it: “Our target consumers have been watching John McEnroe and Charles Barkley for years. The emotional ties are in place.” Watching, not doing. Emotional ties, not real needs. Nike is not trying to export sneakers (a limited market, the corporation acknowledges), it is trying to export Michael Jordan who, Chairman Knight assures us, is tied for first place in China as the world’s greatest man with Chou En-lai (an astonishing comparison that, from the viewpoint of sales, is apparently nonetheless