How Nike Comes Up With Great Ideas
“Just do it.” I love this Nike slogan. It conveys a can-do attitude that encourages me to stop procrastinating, get off the couch, and take action! But, just do what, exactly? Take what action? If you want to drive growth through innovation, how do you know where to focus and what to do? There a lot of companies “just doing it” and most of them are just failing! In many cases, entrepreneurs are wasting time and money pursuing the flawed approach of launching a minimally viable product and “failing faster” before they have clarified the market need. This is a huge waste of time if you don’t know what the customer is trying to get done first. Let’s take a look at how Nike is winning and what we can learn from them.
I had the good fortune to hear Brad Wolf, former Director of Product Marketing & Fuelband Partners at Nike’s growing Digital Sport Division, when he spoke at OSU recently. This was a special treat because Nike was selected the 2013 #1 Most Innovative Company by Fast Company for their success launching two new-to-the-world products, Fuelband and Flyknit. Fuelband is a $150 electronic bracelet that measures your movements throughout the day and motivates you to increase your activity. Flyknit is a lightweight shoe that feels like a sock atop a sole but it’s actually a new technology platform that Nike can use to enhance other product categories as well. These innovations evoke comparisons with Apple because Nike is creating new product categories.
With Fuelband, Nike has expanded beyond athletic shoes and apparel into mobile devices, information, and service. Both Fuelband and Flyknit require Nike to obtain new capabilities, new business partners, and develop new business models. For many leaders, such a bold move into “new markets” would be rejected for being outside the company’s core competencies or strategic fit. So how did Nike do it? One key factor for their success lies in how they define their mission, vision, and their market. The only way a company can hope to continue driving growth through innovation year after year is to define its mission and vision in terms of satisfying customers’ needs, not selling product. Look at Nike’s mission statement:
“To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world.
* If you have a body, you are an athlete.” – Bill Bowerman, Nike Co-Founder
This is a great mission statement on a number of levels. It fosters innovation in particular because it focuses employees on delivering the timeless customer emotional need, to feel inspired (as well as calling out innovation as part of the mission).
Additionally, Nike’s vision statement continues “To carry on his legacy (Bill Bowerman) of innovative thinking, whether to develop products that help athletes of every level of ability reach their potential…”
This vision statement fosters innovation as well because it focuses on the timeless customer functional need, to help athletes reach their potential. Together, these simple statements provide everyone in the company with clarity and focus, to help customers feel inspired, and reach their potential.
Having a market-based definition of their mission and market makes all the difference in the world. The folks at P& G understand that people don’t want to buy a mop; they want to clean the floor and P&G created Swiffer, a billion dollar product. The folks at Salesforce.com understand that people don’t want to buy CRM software; they want to manage/enhance their customer and prospect relationships, and Salesforce created the leading Software-as-a-Service CRM solution. And the folks at Nike understand that people don’t want to buy a Fuelband wrist bracelet; they want to feel inspired, and reach their potential.
I had an opportunity to ask Brad how Nike has been so effective creating entirely new businesses that go well beyond its traditional capabilities and his answer was informative: “We were just filling-out our mission and vision.” Nike never could have come up with these winning new-to-the-world products if they viewed their mission as providing customers with “superior athletic shoes and apparel.” Additionally, when we understand that the focus must be on helping customers achieve their objectives, NOT on our products or capabilities, we are no longer constrained by current solutions. Now coming up with new-to-world offerings doesn’t seem so remarkable.
Never fall in love with your solution. Nobody cares about our solutions except as a means to accomplish their ends. Companies that define themselves according to their solutions are destined to fail because products come and go. Only the customers’ objectives – independent of solutions – is worthy of your focus because it remains the same year after year. In a hundred years, people will still want to feel inspired, and reach their potential even while new solutions will have emerged to do it. The only way to envision the future is to create it and the only way to create it is to focus on what your customers want to accomplish and/or experience. Before you “just do it,” make sure you “just clarify what the customer wants to accomplish” first.
