"Just Do It": A Chinese student poses in front of a poster of Michael Jordan, who promotes Nike in China
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Sports simply wasn't a factor in a country where, since the days of Confucius, education levels and test scores dictated success. So Nike executives set themselves a potentially quixotic challenge: to change China's culture. Recalls Terry Rhoads, then director of sports marketing for Nike in China: "We thought, 'We won't get anything if they don't play sports.'" A Chinese speaker, Rhoads saw basketball as Nike's ticket. He donated equipment to Shanghai's high schools and paid them to open their basketball courts to the public after hours. He put together three-on-three tournaments and founded the city's first high school basketball league, the Nike League, which has spread to 17 cities. At games, Rhoads blasted the recorded sound of cheering to encourage straitlaced fans to loosen up, and he arranged for the state-run television network to broadcast the finals nationally. The Chinese responded: sales through the 1990s picked up 60% a year. "Our goal was to hook kids into Nike early and hold them for life," says Rhoads, who now runs a Shanghai-based sports marketing company, Zou Marketing. Nike also hitched its wagon to the NBA (which had begun televising games in China), bringing players like Michael Jordan for visits. Slowly but surely, in-the-know Chinese came to call sneakers "Nai-ke."
And those sneakers brought with them a lot more than just basketball. Nike gambled that the new middle class, now some 40 million people who make an average of $8,500 a year for a family of three, was developing a whole new set of values, centered on individualism. Nike unabashedly made American culture its selling point, with ads that challenge China's traditional, group-oriented ethos. This year the company released Internet teaser clips showing a faceless but Asian-looking high school basketball player shaking-and-baking his way through a defense. It was timed to coincide with Nike tournaments around the country and concluded with the question, "Is this you?" The viral advertisement drew 5 million e-mails. Nike then aired TV spots contrasting Chinese-style team-oriented play with a more individualistic American style, complete with a theme song blending traditional Chinese music and hip-hop.
Starting in 2001, Nike coined a new phrase for its China marketing, borrowing from American black street culture: "Hip Hoop." The idea is to "connect Nike with a creative lifestyle," says Frank Pan, Nike's current director of sports marketing for China. The company's Chinese website even encourages rap-style trash talk. "Shanghai rubbish, you lose again!" reads a typical posting for a Nike League high school game. The hip-hop message "connects the disparate elements of black cool culture and associates it with Nike," says Edward Bell, director of planning for Ogilvy & Mather in Hong Kong. "But black culture can be aggressive, and Nike softens it to make it more acceptable" to Chinese. At a recent store opening in Shanghai, Nike flew in a streetball team from Beijing. The visitors humiliated their opponents while speakers blasted rapper 50 Cent as he informed the Chinese audience that he is a P-I-M-P with impure designs on their mothers.