Nike: Young Male Athletes In Sports Advertising

In the world of sports marketing, one company stands alone, Nike. They have continued to run the table in almost every sport over all of their competition. They are so big that they even have subdivisions within their company such as the Air Jordan brand. The reason that they are dominating other big brands is their marketing. This paper will show how Nike’s marketing targets young male athletes in baseball, football, and basketball advertisements. Imagine you are a young baseball fan watching your favorite team, the Yankees, playing on tv. Your favorite player Derek Jeter is in the field, anticipating every possible outcome and calculating what each situation calls for. It’s the top of the fourth inning and the Indians are up to bat. There’s

There are also current MLB players that have endorsement deals with Nike including Mike Trout. Mike Trout is a phenomenal outfielder for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim who has received numerous awards for his play. He recently released his signature Nike cleats, the Nike Lunar Vapor Trouts. Advertisement #2 shows Trout holding his cleats along with a muscular mannequin that is fully outfitted with other Nike baseball clothes. While this is another example of celebrity endorsement, it also has other minor marketing techniques that are not as obvious. This first being the very muscular mannequin. This mannequin is meant to make the clothes look even better to a young athlete because they will imagine themselves looking like that. It’s almost as if they are using the mannequin to say that if you wear our clothes you will look like this. Therefore, it becomes more appealing to a young male athlete. The second background technique used is the background of the advertisement itself. They made the background look good with bright neon colors that catch the eye so that if you were just walking by you would see the advertisement instead of passing it by. And thus more and more people would see the

So some of the best Nike football advertisements show some of the best players in the NFL. They have multiple endorsement deals with different players so that fans of different team will see advertisements of their favorite team’s players. Therefore, Nike will have the highest probability to appeal to different customers at the same time. In advertisement #5, 35 professional players from every team are lined up under the lights and the words, “fast is faster.” This advertisement is actually selling Nike NFL jerseys to the consumers. As a young male athlete you can see the extensive amount of support by professional athletes for Nike. While everyone knows those players get paid millions of dollars for those endorsements, the advertisements still give the viewers to buy their products because a member of their favorite team or or favorite player might be pictured. So they will buy the new jersey of that player or team. The print advertisement also gives the viewer the idea that these players are almost mystical by putting them under the lights where you can barely see their faces. This is done purposefully so that the viewer focuses more on the jerseys than the players