Cracking Your Brand’s Genetic Code
By Scott Bedbury

November 30^th, 1987              

On my first day at Nike, I found myself sitting in the private conference room of the company’s CEO founder, Phil Knight, in the old Murray 1 Building in Beaverton, Oregon. This was three years before Nike built its impressive corporate campus- an enormous hundred-acre shrine to sports and fitness- and its headquarters back then was spread across six nondescript leased office complexes in Portland and Beaverton.

In those days, Nike was running a distant third in the sneaker world, behind the German juggernaut Adidas and its chief domestic rival, Reebok. Nothing in the appearance of Nike’s corporate offices suggested it would one day become a global powerhouse, much less an international protagonist for sports and fitness in the highest sense. Apart from the occasional poster of an athlete or a shoe framed on a well, any of the headquarters buildings could easily have been mistaken for an insurance office, from the inside as well as put. Phil Knight’s office windows looked out at a strip mall, anchored by a Kmart.

In my first few hours as Nike’s director of corporate advertising, I’d done a little snooping around, hoping to find among the papers and records left behind by my predecessors some clues to my future existence. Rob Strasser, Peter Moore, and Cindy Hale, the threesome that had kept a tight rein on Nike design and marketing matters for more than a decade, had left in their wake an advertising plan that consisted of little more than three pages of budget numbers, grouped under two seasonal product launches. Such informality was typical of Nike in those days. Insofar as I had been able to ascertain, the marketing department’s traditions, like those of the Bedouin, were entirely oral.

In the absence of any formal or written direction, I decided to seek out Phil Knight for some verbal guidance. Unfortunately for me, Knight was not one to tell any of his staff- especially a key employee, and a new hire to boot- exactly what to do. He spent a good deal of time recruiting talented people who, he hoped against hope, would eventually grasp the core values of Nike, and then he very deliberately got the hell out of their way. As some of those new hires would learn to their distress, Phil Knight would only reemerge- and loom large in your presence- if you really screwed up.

“What would be the single most important thing I can do for you right now”? I asked, after taking a seat in the sparsely furnished conference room adjoining his office. Hardly anyone ever entered his actual office. That was the inner sanctum. Knight pondered my request for a moment and, with a strange combination of grimace and shrug, effectively parried my opening thrust.

            “Just do great things,” he replied, rubbing one hand across his grizzled jaw.

            “But what if I end up making mistakes”? I wondered out loud, feeling not much more enlightened by this broad exhortation that I had by the so- called marketing plan.

            “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Knight replied cheerfully.

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