The Importance of Being First
It’s important to underscore just how critical a requirement it is for urban consumers to access desirable items before others to cement their standing as trendsetters. By having a product first, the trendsetter affirms his status. As a result the trendsetter is willing to pay a premium. I was routinely offered cash to buy my Jordan product samples simply because they had yet to be released. In one case, a guy offered $500 for a pair of my Jordan samples that weren’t even in his size!
By seeding the product with the barbers first, the word of mouth was the greatest form of advertising we could imagine because everyone wanted to see the newest Jordan, which made the demand even stronger because the product wasn’t available in the stores yet. To this day, this notion of limited demand and seeding is the single most important element many brands overlook when targeting the urban market. Shortly afterwards on a trip to Inglewood to meet with the barbers at my favorite shop across from Inglewood Sports, I happened across another barber shop and noticed Reebok had placed a kiosk there. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. A few years later, The Wall Street Journal did a story on how barbershops had become a marketing tool for brands, citing my innovation with the Jordan product.
Most of the action in LA took place at the malls with the national retailers like Footaction, the first of the athletic specialty retailers to embrace Hip Hop and urban culture. It realized that the consumer would buy the Air Jordan but then want one of the urban apparel brands to “hook up” with. For an urban marketer, the notion of the “hook up” is an important one. Because Nike’s apparel was performance-oriented and less lifestyle focused, shoe consumers would purchase urban apparel brands to complete their fashion look. The apparel designers for the urban apparel brands would look at the colors for our new footwear to decide which colors they would introduce that season, realizing the consumer would instantly hook it up with the footwear.
Footaction found great success by merchandising footwear and urban apparel “hook ups” with brands such as FUBU, Enyce, and Rocawear to present the entire lifestyle. Sales went through the roof. Later, I also persuaded urban retailers to merchandise the latest fashion accessory, the mobile phone, which helped Motorola become part of the urban lifestyle. I always tried to leverage the urban consumer perspective back on the Nike campus and during sales meetings. One year, Astor and I did a man-on-the-street segment from the world-famous Apollo Theater in Harlem and included video from some of our retail visits and consumer interactions. The goal was to expose the organization to a world and urban consumer touch points that were relatively unknown to many at Nike. Another year, a fictitious barbershop set at a sales meeting demonstrated to the sales force how the Jordan product was as much a fixture in urban lifestyles off the court as it was on the court.
While market travel was always an eye-opening experience, there was nothing like witnessing a release day for the Air Jordans. Our key consumers knew the day the shoes were releasing and went to extreme measures to be the first to get them. They would line up before the store opened. It wasn’t just the core urban kids, either. Consumers would fly over from Japan and other Asian countries to purchase as many of the new shoes as they could.
In response, the stores had to create policies to limit the purchases. In some cases, there were near riots. We received a lot of feedback from parents and schools who expressed concern over students skipping school in order to get the latest Air Jordans. MJ and I talked about the issue and he really wanted to do something about it. Eventually, we changed our release dates to Saturdays. MJ took a lot of criticism for his supposed lack of social consciousness. With regard to school attendance and the violence associated with gang members who were targeting innocents who wore Air Jordans in the color of a certain gang, MJ demonstrated real concern and compassion for youth and was vocal and instrumental in the decisions we ultimately made. I remember getting a call from a Nightline producer who wanted to do a story on the extremes that kids were going to, including violence, in order to land a pair of Air Jordans. There was much debate at Nike about whether MJ should appear on the program. My PR background told me it would help quell the fervor if he went on Nightline.
I also told him it would send a powerful message to parents and educators that he did care about youth and was not disconnected from the impact his image and the product had on their lives. Nike is certainly not one to succumb to pressure to appease its many critics. There was some internal debate, but he did agree to go on. Both MJ and I were interviewed and appeared on the show. The issue quickly died down. Without question, the footwear and apparel industries have felt a favorable impact from urban consumers. The market feedback from consumers and retail associates on a release day was more valuable than anything I would ever get in weeks of meetings on Nike’s campus.
As part of the perspective I carried back to Beaverton to help the brand stay ahead of the curve, I suggested to MJ and my Nike colleagues that he should consider making an impromptu visit to one of the urban retail locations on an Air Jordan release day. No press, no photo ops. Just MJ mingling with consumers as any CEO should. After all, even though he was retired and no longer playing, it was his brand. Such a visit would send a buzz and type of word of mouth throughout the neighborhood that advertising could never buy. It would go a long way in increasing his relevance among the urban target. The feeling around the conference room was that MJ needed to keep a certain mystique and visiting a retailer would compromise that. Many did not understand the value of making such a visit to Harlem.
I placed a picture on the table of a younger MJ surrounded by a group of inner-city kids on a playground during his rookie season. The picture was from one of the early commercial shoots where MJ first struck the Jumpman pose, ball outstretched and legs fully cocked gliding through the air against the Chicago skyline. It was an attempt to remind everyone of the urban constituency from which Air Jordan’s popularity originally ascended. Here we were some thirteen years later and MJ had become somewhat disconnected from the urban consumer given his global icon status.
My feeling was that it would be a great way for he and the brand to connect to the culture since he was no longer playing and athletes like Allen Iverson and others with “street cred” were beginning to increase their appeal among urban consumers. Mystique eventually overruled street-level buzz and it was decided not to make the visit. There also was legitimate concern over how other retailers might react since they would all have given their right arm to have MJ visit their store on a release day.
Eventually, MJ did make such a visit. Ironically, Nike later announced plans to open a Jordan brand store in Harlem on the very 125th Street “laboratory” where I began my clinical observations as an urban consumer scientist. As I canvassed the urban market for Nike and observed the increasing growth and popularity of Hip-Hop music and urban culture, I began to identify several distinct clusters of consumers forming around the urban mindset. This mindset related to their choices and preferences for language, brands, music, fashion and attitude. I called them the 7 Ciphers.
