Chapter four: The Marketing Environment

Target Market- is a defined group that managers feel is most likely to buy a firm's product. For Nike, their target markets are males and females ages 18 through 35. Basically, Nike's target market is college and competitive level athletes. 

Marketing Mix- is a unique combination of product, place, promotion and price strategies.

Even though managers control the marketing mix, they have to work with the external marketing environment in order for the company to stay effective and continue to make profits. The external marketing environment has six factors which are, social, demographic, economic, political, technological and competitive factors.  Nike Inc. analyzes all the factors and does their best to execute well in every factor. Nike's main priority is to create and develop new products to help athletes reach and performe at their highest potentials. Even though the target market is males and females between the ages of 18 and 35, nike stills reaches out to other generations and create products for younger and  older consumers. They make sure consumers of all kinds are satisfied by creating products for all types of sports including, football, basketball, baseball, track and other sports. If you go to nike.com, you can see on the top left side it shows the different groups of people they target (men, women and kids).
(Link to nike.com : http://www.nike.com/us/en_us/)
If you click on each of them it will open up a new page and it goes into detail asking for what kinds of products you want to look for and all the prices vary depending on the target of the product.
For example, a pair of Nike Vapor Jet 2.0 gloves for men will cost  $45.00 but for kids it costs $30.00. But also, over time the prices of the products will decrease and make them more affortable for consumers that aren't able to purchase the products in their first release.

 

Here are two pictures of these gloves. The top one is the men's version and the bottom one is the kids version.

Chapter three: Ethics and Social Responsibility 

Ethics- This refers to the moral principles or values that generally govern the conduct of an individual or a group. It can also be viewed as a standard of behavior by which conduct is judged.

Nike Inc. has a code of ethics for all employees called Inside the lines. This defines the standards that employees are expected to follow and includes a range of topics on employee activity, ethical behavior, product safety, legal compliance, competition and use of resources.  Every year, all employees are required to verify that they read and understood Inside the lines. Nike Inc. also has a toll-free Alert Line for employees to report any suspected violations of the code of ethics. I actually like what Nike Inc. does, they have these codes that ALL employees have to go by so its like everyone is equal and on the same page. Also that employees get a chance to say what they might see that may be a violation in how the company should act and work.

Social Responsibility- This is a business's concern for society's welfare.

As part of Nike's commitment to help the environment, the Reuse-a-shoe program has provided Nike Grind recycled material to over 300 sport and playground surfacing projects donated by Nike's community investment programs in many places around the world. Since 1990, 28,000,000,000 pairs of shoes have been collected for this.  In Nike, they believe in unleashing human potential on the field, on the court and in life. The Nike foundation takes the power of potential in doing all they can to help with one of the biggest issues we have world wide, global poverty. When The Nike foundation started in 2004, they wanted to invest in something great and help poverty from its main root with adolescent girls. This is the main focus because they believe that  investing in a girl before she is married, pregnant and HIV positive is a solution for poverty. This is why The Nike Foundation supports a movement called The Girl Effect. Here is a video on The Girl Effect movement:

Chapter two: Strategic Planning for Competitive Advantage   

President and CEO Mark Parker said: “At NIKE, Inc. we run a complete offense, and it’s based on a core commitment to innovation. That’s how we stay opportunistic, serve the athlete, reward our shareholders, and continue to lead our industry.” Nike Inc. sets  themselves apart from competition by the way the run their company, not only selling athletic footwear but also apparel and all types of sports equipment . A huge reason why Nike is above their competitors is because of the strong relationships they have with many athletes and companies.  Nike Inc. teamed up with companies like  Cole Haan, Converse Inc., Hurley International LLC, NIKE Golf, Umbro Ltd. and the Jordan Brand to expand themselves through out the U.S and the rest of the world having operations in over 160 countries. Its football season now and one thing we all can see is that  the NFL is now sponsored by Nike Inc. so they were in charge of designing and creating  the new uniforms for this season. Nike also sponsors some of the greatest athletes in the game today to wear  their cleats , gloves and other Nike gear. Some of these athletes are , Larry Fitzgerald, Clay Matthews, Ndamukong Suh, Darrell Revis, and many other greats.  Another thing that sets Nike apart is their standard about diversity:

With great diversity, comes all the different ideas and different point of views in what they do. This is why Nike Inc. is a very large company through out the globe.

Nike is great at what they do, marketing their products; having great athletes to do commercials for them which grabs the attention of fans who enjoy watching those athletes perform. I know that I would buy a product that an athlete is wearing and is performing great in. Nike has commercials with athletes wearing their gear and basically saying that if you want to play like these athletes and perform at a high level, you should also use Nike gear. A great example of this is this video: