Insight

Imagine that you have the largest marketshare, and yet you’ve lost the audience that you started your company to serve in the first place.

While Nike had an impressive 23% of the global marketshare of athletic footwear, only 9% of runners at marathons lined up at the starting line in Nikes. Nike clearly had a problem attracting dedicated runners to their brand and product. The opportunity was huge, with estimates of the global running community being anywhere from 65 – 100 million runners.

The opportunity

In 2012, the Olympic Track and Field trials were held in Eugene, the home of track and field in the United States. We seized upon this moment to claim leadership in the industry in both product innovation and leadership in the running community through Nike+.

A house of running innovation

We had an entire soccer field to create a house of running innovation. Working with our partners at Skylab, Hush and Big Giant, we created custom pavilions that housed amazing experiences that immersed runners in the speed of track and field.

Treadmill race and Heatmap

Over the course of one week, we recruited 30k new Nike+ runners through a treadmill race that pitted runners against each other for a spot on a digital leaderboard. We served the running community with branded Nike+ Services, such as a Nike+ Heatmap, which displayed running data on a map of Eugene.

Speed Tunnel

We created an iconic demonstration of the Nike+ experience with Olympic athletes in the Nike+ Speed Tunnel by highlighting our athlete’s performance with Nike+ data, in real-time.

From track to street

We leveraged Nike’s dominance on the track to showcase the DNA of our racing products appearing alongside our biggest mainstream running products.