History of Nike - Research Paper Example

The initial name adopted for the company now known as NIKE, was Blue Ribbon Sports (BRS), whose dual founders were Philip Knight and Bill Bowerman in January 1964 (Quinn, 60). While Philip Knight was a track athlete at the time, the latter was his coach during that period (Quinn, 60). The duo initially started business by distributing the products of Japanese shoe maker (en.wikipedia.org) Onitsuka Tiger and this was carried out by selling shoes in Knight’s car trunk at occasional track meets (Frisch, 8).

This gave them an interesting opportunity to promote the products in front of athletes and the likes. With antics such as these, the company earned large profits and 1967 saw the opening of the first ever retail store of the BRS, in Santa Monica, California (Frisch, 8). Around 1971 BRS called it quits with their primary distributer and took the plunge of launching their own line of footwear (Frisch, 16). June 18, 1971 was the first time ever when one of BRS’s products, a soccer shoe named ‘NIKE’, deriving its name from the Greek goddess of victory, bore the design Swoosh, by Carolyn Davidson (Carbasho, 9).

The next year BRS introduced its first line of NIKE shoes and eight years later BRS, Inc. officially came to be known as NIKE, Inc., (Wong, 220). Initially the advertising for trading companies was done through mail order as was the norm in the first half of the twenty first century. However post 1970, whenever companies intended to give out any sort of discounts or inform of any new arrivals, Newspaper advertisements was the medium chosen. Radio and television were also considered as other ways which have been used since the beginning of NIKE to market its products, but Ingham (314) provides proof that a print ad from the 1970s suggested that "word-of-foot" advertising was causing more people to like the products of BRS/NIKE rather than television ads.

According to Wahl