Just Do It — The Age of Marketing

In 1988, in America, a single old man appeared on the television screen. Eighty years of age. Across San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, bare-chested, he runs on, calm and steady. In the cold air of early morning, he says he runs this bridge every day. Not an athlete, not a famous player. Just one old man who never stops running. At the end of that footage, only three words rose into view — Just Do It.

These three words would go on to change the history of the sneaker — no, the history of advertising itself. Until then, shoe commercials had competed over cushioning, lightness, the excellence of materials. But the path Nike chose was something entirely different. Without speaking a single word of the shoe’s function, it set fire directly to the heart of the viewer. This company, which the previous episode had seen awaken to ‘selling stories’ through the Air Jordan, now stepped into the territory of selling emotion itself.

The Night the Three Words Were Born

The slogan ‘Just Do It’ was born not inside Nike but at a small outside advertising firm. Wieden+Kennedy, an agency only recently founded. Its co-founder Dan Wieden, it is said, wrung out these words for Nike, his first major client.

What is intriguing is the unexpected origin behind these forward-looking, powerful words. Dan Wieden later said he drew the inspiration for these three words from the words a certain death-row inmate was said to have spoken just before his execution. The short utterance of a man resolved as he walked toward death. The unanswerable resolve that lay within it, Wieden inverted into a call to sport.

What made these words so skillful was that, while seeming to command nothing, they gently prodded at the ‘self that hasn’t done it’ lying deep within the viewer’s heart. They do not say that buying the shoe will make you faster. They merely push your back: move. Rather than arguing by logic the reason one ought to buy, they call up the emotion of wanting to move. And as the vessel to receive that emotion, the Nike shoe is right there — that was the kind of advertising it was.

The Invention of Selling Emotion

In this era, Nike poured colossal sums into advertising. It was reported to have spent a great deal on promotion in 1988 alone, and that investment came back, before long, as a dramatic surge in sales. In the decade after the slogan appeared, the brand’s revenue is said to have swelled to a point that changed its very order of magnitude.

The protagonists of the advertising changed too. Nike signed first-rate athletes and celebrities one after another, weaving their very personalities into the brand’s story. A character played by a film director lightly held forth about the Air Jordan; an all-around athlete who excelled across multiple sports cheerfully repeated that he ‘knew’ this or that. The advertising was no longer an explanation of the product but a short story, an entertainment. People forgot even the sense of being sold a shoe, and became fans of the story instead.

Let us step back a little and survey what was happening here. We had come a long way from the era when the brothers of Herzogenaurach staked their lives on making the ‘thing’ that was a better shoe. At the Miracle of Bern, it was the performance of the shoe — the removable studs — that decided victory and lifted the brand. Yet in this era, what lifted the brand was not the performance of the shoe but the emotion and story draped over it.

Of course, the competition over performance had not vanished. Air, the waffle sole — they rested on an accumulation of technology. But the meaning of the money people paid for shoes was surely changing. It shifted smoothly from payment for a tool that makes the feet faster, to payment for a certain mood or image, and for a sense of belonging — the feeling that ‘I am a person on this side.‘

The Shoe Becomes ‘Culture’

Through the age of ‘Just Do It,’ the sneaker completely transcended the frame of footwear.

First, it became ‘culture.’ Which model of which brand a person wore became a language that spoke of their tastes, their values, the community they belonged to. Among young people especially, the shoe was a part of self-expression continuous with music and fashion. An age had come in which a single sneaker told, more eloquently than words, who a person was.

And it also became ‘status.’ A hard-to-obtain limited model or a sought-after pair drew envious gazes simply by being owned. The shoe was, at once, a practical item and a symbol of a quiet pride and superiority, and people came to form lines in order to obtain that symbol. The culture of limited sneaker releases and resale that would overheat in a later era had, one might say, already budded in this moment when ‘the shoe became status.’

This change was not something adidas or PUMA could remain unconnected to. The long-established brands, born in Europe and forged on the field of competition, too were drawn, willing or not, into this new game of selling emotion and story. The Sneaker Wars had shifted their stage from a battle of products to a battle of images.

And yet — at the very moment when a three-word slogan set the world ablaze and the shoe climbed to the summit of culture and status, in a place unseen from that glittering main stage, another reality was quietly unfolding. The factories where the longed-for shoes were being produced, one pair after another. The site of production had, at some point, been moved far across the sea, to countries where wages were low. Over that place, where the spotlight does not reach, a long shadow that would in time shake the brilliance of the brands was stretching out. Next time, we step into the story of that shadow.