The Future Of Nike Is In His Hands.

If we must connect Nike, the biggest sports brand in the world with a person, who will you think of? Maybe you will name many of the top spokesmen of Nike: Michael Jordan, tiger, Woods, Kobe, James, Xiaowei, C Luo... These people represent the top athletes in Nike, but they are not the ones who can control the situation.

Maybe you will think of Phil Nate (Phil Knight) and Bill Bowerman (Bill Bowerman), the two founders of Nike. Or the core figures of Tinker Hatfield and MarkParker's two bit Nike.

Yes, these people have done a great job in this great company. But as the last CEO Mark announced its retirement at the end of 2019, Nike ushered in their new CEO, Tang Ruoxiu (John Donahoe) in the quarter, Mark.

What is the big guy? Let's introduce this article to you.

Let's take a look at who is Tang.

A white uncle.

In fact, such a character is not unusual in the streets of Europe and America. It is difficult for us to associate him with the sports brand. This is the case. Tang's past experience does not have any work experience related to sports brand. So if we have to use a word to define the origin of Tang and Nike, it must be "airborne".

It should be noted that Tang Ruoxiu had already entered the Nike board for 5 years.

Of course, this is a very strong airborne, Ebay-Paypal-ServiceNow-Nike, all the chairman of the board +CEO.

At this point, if careful study, Tang Ruoxiu and Nike are not unrelated, for example, school, Tang Ruoxiu is graduated from Stanford University business school graduate, this point he and Nike founder Phil Knight is the same. At this time, we can find the common characteristics of these two, that is, Standford's business school.

As one of the best business schools in the world, Standford business school can no doubt cultivate students into the most advanced business minded individuals. (Standford's motto is: the wind of freedom, especially the respect for students' personal characteristics) so that among these two graduates, Phil has become a top business sense athlete, and John has become a programmer with the highest commercial consciousness.

Now, what will happen to this top programmer who comes from Nike?

Advance and attack

Under ideal circumstances, Nike will continue to maintain its strong growth trend for many years. There is no doubt that a high quality online platform will become a new direction of Nike research and development in this era of data kings. At this time, we must mention Tang Ruoxiu's ServiceNow, which is the top SaaS Unicorn enterprise.

ServiceNow has now become a huge enterprise worth 67 billion 100 million dollars.

SaaS, or Software-as-a-Service software service, is to help others with software. In this highly competitive industry, ServiceNow has grown from 5 in 2007 to 100% in 2012, and has jumped to third in the industry. And more importantly, ServiceNow is the SaaS service provider in the ITSM field. In brief, they serve the big enterprises professionally and help large enterprises establish, develop, perfect and operate their own IT systems.

S23NYC is still an independent team.

In the past long time, Nike is more willing to outsource its IT business, especially the SNKRS (Nike FIT) these years are differentiated management by the way of acquisition team. These new ways of selling have not yet become the core of Nike sales. It must be discovered that it seems that in the 19 winter, Nike launched the Nike APP and its own SNKRS competition.

Not really, because Nike APP is a pro son, a "pillar of the future home", a product of Nike's own IT team, and SNKRS is a product of S23NYC's independent team. With the departure of Mark Parker in 2020, the direction of Nike's whole group began to undergo subtle changes. Because they no longer want to use external force to complete the upgrading of software, but want to enhance their internal IT strength to the world's most advanced level.

Under such a goal, Tang became the new CEO candidate. As the "most selling software CEO in the world", it has also done the CEO of the third party payment software Paypal and the online transaction platform Ebay. This is equivalent to a top architect who manages Alipay and Taobao to specialize in making a Nike APP. The future Nike wants to rely on the power of the online platform to further widen its gap with peers.

Now Nike APP has also begun to undertake some SNKRS's work on offering limited products.

For consumers like us, Nike also has an obvious tilt towards resources. For example, we all stars this time also saw the limited style not only can be bought on SNKRS, but also can draw lots on Nike APP. The previous OW x Nike dress series was sold only on Nike APP.

Does this sign indicate that Nike is going to abandon SNKRS? No, because SNKRS is a great software that really changes the way the sneakers are sold. Only now, Nike will take the experience gained from the SNKRS to stride forward to the next stop, and this journey will be directed by industry expert Tang Liu Xiu.

Retreat and defend

Of course, a Nike APP will not be the only reason for Nike to choose Tang Ruoxiu. The reason why Nike is so fierce is to choose Tang if he can advance and retreat.

The importance of online sales is most clear to us Chinese. For example, wish, known as "Taobao of America," won the Lakers' jersey advertisement. At the same time, professional shoe selling platform StockX and GOAT have also been invested by major groups. In the current Nike business mode, the sales side is still mainly based on distributors. Baosheng, BELLE, Footlocker and JD Sports are big distribution groups. They are not Nike. As the two tier market grows at the naked eye, the brand side is unmoved, but distributors have already seen the opportunity. If this is allowed to develop, the future distributor / tier two platform will have greater influence and market share. Nike, of course, has seen the potential risks, because in the near future, the global online consumption channels will completely change the business rules of almost all industries, especially in the other side of China, the giant Taobao has placed the vision of online retailing in front of Nike.

A small case was inserted here, when Toys R us, the largest toy company in the United States, was translated into "online toys", because it did not adapt to online transactions in time, and was completely seized by Amazon Amazon.

To sum up, to do online sales, Nike is not only breaking its limits, but also consolidating its existing resources and advantages. At this point, I will go back to that problem. If we want to strengthen online sales, will anyone else be more suitable than Tang Ruoxiu, who has served as Ebay and Paypal CEO?

There is no doubt that Tang Ruoxiu's arrival has identified the future direction of Nike development.

Now, we can quietly wait for the way he will change the future of Nike.