Comparative Analysis of Nikess Competitive Position - Case Study Example

The paper "Comparative Analysis of Nikes’s Competitive Position" is a great example of a case study on business. Many of the world’s largest buildings started as small ventures. With dedication and proper organizational culture, they grew to the multinational companies dominating the market today. An example of such a company is the NIKE. The company started as a brainchild idea of Phil Knight, a graduate of the Stanford Business School, in the early 1960s. His lecturer at Oregon University had assigned him a project on how he can create a company.

Taking the project further into reality, he developed it into a business. He was an ardent fan of athletics and was also an athlete himself. Using his taste for comfortable sporting shoes, which were both light and inexpensive, he toured Japan where he identified the exact shoes he was looking for. Though there were many companies already selling inexpensive shoes in the US, he was ready to introduce his imported shoe into the US market. The sporting shoes identified at the Japanese market had Tiger as their brand name, and the manufacturer was a company by the name Onitsuka.

He introduced himself as a shoe importer from the US and gave Blue Ribbon Sports as the name of his imaginary company. He bought his first batch and sold them from the trunk of his car, at regional track meets. He would sustain his new business by working as an accountant (Frisch 2009, p.4; Hollister 2008, p.197). Knight knew that to beat other large suppliers like the Adidas from Germany; he had to strategize well. He for this reason sought a well-known coach to promote his shoes. The coach, Bill Bowerman, was Knight’s former track coach at the Oregon University.

Each of them chipped in $500 to increase the imported stock. Bowerman would promote the shoes to college athletes, and Knight would handle the other activities of the business. Within a short time, they had retailed more than 1,300 pairs of shoes. In 1965, they recruited Jeff Johnson, a former running rival, into the company to help with the sales, paying him on a commission basis. Johnson proved to be a resourceful person in the business by selling a large number of shoes such that he was absorbed as the first full-time employee of the company.

As a business-oriented person, Johnson would hand out T-shirts with the Tiger name, on them so as to promote the shoes.