Nike Case

Executive Summary

Many popular brands are using celebrities as spokespeople to enhance their brand image. This attitude study aims to research the effects of athlete endorsements (Tiger Woods) on brand image (Nike), in particular, whether Nike has been affected by the change in Tiger Woods' image due to his recent personal life difficulties.

We developed the study to find the following:

1. The overall attitude toward Nike as a brand

2. The overall attitude toward Tiger Woods as a person

3. The overall attitude of Tiger as an endorser of Nike

4. Do consumers separate their feelings regarding the person Tiger and the golfer Tiger, and associate Nike simply with the professional aspects and does it affect the brand?

Based on the result set we received, we believe that having Tiger Woods as an endorser hasn't negatively impacted Nike's brand image. Based on our research we think Nike can continue to use Tiger Woods as the endorser. However, we would recommend Nike to find a fresh athlete with similar stature in sports as Tiger in 2012, as Tiger hasn't won a major championship since 2008, and he's probably not going to be as popular with the new generation of consumers.

Analysis Methodology

To find out what attitudes people hold towards Tiger Woods and towards Nike, a survey was designed and conducted among 30 of our classmates. The goal of the study was to figure out how closely people associate endorser with the brand and how any negative perception of the endorser can lead to negativity towards the brand. In particular, our research and analysis focus on the relationship between the attitudes towards Tiger and Nike. That is, how strongly are people's attitudes towards Nike affected by their attitudes towards Tiger Woods?

The questionnaire is aimed at investigating how people's view of Tiger Woods affects how they view Nike. First, we determined the attributes closely related to sport apparels and ask people to rank these attributes. Next, we determined the importance of each of the attribute as related to Nike and Tiger Woods. We then try to find the general attitude toward Nike, Tiger, and Nike with Tiger. For the full questionnaire see Appendix I. Note we have ignored demographic differences in the data.

Nike's Perceived Brand Personality

The respondents were asked about how strong they perceived certain characteristics to be in relation to Nike. The results are displayed in the following chart.

As can be deduced from the graph, Nike overall scores highly in most the categories. The strong association of Nike brand with sports is clear from the high scores it gets 3 dimensions: performance, athleticism and style. The characteristics earning the lowest average are fresh and victory. One thing to note is that the since we did not compare Nike with other sporting brands we did not have enough data to understand whether the low scores represent weakness of the brand or less importance of the attributes for the brands in this category.

Tiger Woods Perceived Image

The same