I’m sure that there’ll be less articles on TheScrapBook about new clothes and things, and perhaps more about the effects of the credit crunch on marketing and design, as time goes on. Here’s my first!
Contagious has an interesting article about recession marketing that mentions Nike’s new Zoom Victory shoe. Not only is this a great technological innovation in the construction of the shoe, but it’s a way for their business to retain some money otherwise spent in production.
Fast Company magazine examines the emerging innovations related to the Olympics, and mentions particularly the Nike Zoom Victory. By dispensing with the elements previously needed to hold a sneaker together (stitching, material) in favour of a ‘flywire’ suspension bridge design with merely a coating of fabric, the shoes weigh in at less than a chocolate bar. What’s more, because the design is so pared down, the Nike team can use rapid prototyping to design and manufacture unique versions in a fraction of the time that it would take to knock up a regular sneaker.
What this means is that the Zoom Victory’s cheaper production process could enable Nike to shift some of its manufacturing out of China and back to its home in the United States, thus creating jobs in an otherwise exhausted marketplace.
Any business opportunity for a client that not only cuts costs, but potentially earns them an income and revenue stream is surely onto a winner.
For more on Credit Crunch marketing, check out Contagious’ other article on how consumers might act in a recession and what the opportunity is for us – most notably, apparently, for packaging designers!
2 Comments
I can’t see this bringing good returns to Nike in the short term. The cost of R&D, coupled with the acceptance that such a new technology will bring along more QC issues than a standard, proven manufacturing process, will clearly affect Nike’s numbers on that particular range. It’s a commendable effort, although I have a hard time seeing manufacturing costs as the prime motivation to bring forth such a technology.
Thanks Dan – agree about the short term, but then the recession might be here for a while yet, so anything that pulls economic power back to one’s own close control is a good thing. Long term gains are what many client-side marketers will forget in the next couple of years as many companies look at marketing as a way to cut costs, forgetting the role we’ll play in pushing product – and savings – on to the consumer.
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