Effects of Environmental Factors-NIKE

With more than 44,000 employees across six continents and with their mission “to harness diversity and inclusion to inspire ideas and ignite innovation”, Nike is an organization that conducts both domestic and global marketing. In this situation, it is inevitable that Nike is influenced by environmental factors much.

Let’s start with this example to see what happened in Nike’s history: Nike had introduced its “Air” line of basketball shoes in 1996 with a stylized, flame-like logo of the word Air on the shoe’s backside and sole.Yet, there was a problem. Arab-American groups thought that the way “Air” was written on the shoe looked too similar to “Allah” written in Arabic. Nike recalled thousands of shoes, covered the logos with patches and the shoes made their way to the outlets. Although Nike has apologized to the Islamic community for any unintentional offense to their sensibilities, and has taken measures to raise their internal understanding of Islamic issues, in the end that logo cost Nike millions plus a playground built to ease tensions. We apparently see that some cultural issues may affect companies negatively. In this case, Nike didn’t even consider this consequence while putting those shoes on the market, but they paid dearly for.

On the other hand, Nike, in 2000s, started to seek the best investment with the highest returns. They traced the symptoms of poverty back to their roots, and it led them to an unexpected solution and a catalyst for change: adolescent girls. They believe that when a girl in the developing world realizes her potential, she isn’t the only one who escapes poverty—she brings her family, community, and country with her. That’s why Nike has exclusively focused on adolescent girls and they started to support this “The Girl Effect”. “This isn’t a social issue. It’s smart economics.”,they say. This is the example of how demographical and social issues may affect companies to take a step to put forward their companies in the global market.