David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…It's totally wild. It also is massively scale economies–driven, because the way that you acquire customers and retain customers is with this brand halo of sponsoring these big athletes and putting on these large, very expensive branded events, and competitions. Small companies can't do that. The primary way that you get someone to be a 20-year customer of Nike is to go and spend money on the biggest athletes in the world. The whole game, just like Netflix, is Nike is acquiring content. Nike is acquiring the LeBrons of the world to be Nike athletes. The LeBrons of the world are going to go where there's the most dollars flowing to them. And who can give them the most dollars? The people with the biggest customer bases. It's not just that Nike is paying LeBron a check every year for a lot of money like Converse was back in the day. It's not like, oh, here's your $100,000 check. There's a lineman and an incentive to be part of the biggest machine. The Kobe situation is so illustrative of this. Kobe was with Adidas. Yeah, maybe the Kobe 2 sucked. I don't know, and he didn't like the shoe. I doubt that was the issue. I think the issue was what Nike could do for Kobe, and thus what Kobe could participate in, was exponentially higher than even what Adidas could do. That is huge power. That’s fascinating. The game is to figure out how to have the most customers that you can sell apparel to, and then you get to buy the biggest billboards, and you get to align interest with the biggest billboards. It's a content game on the customer acquisition side. You can make the best commercials that are the most inspiring. That, I guess, doesn't take as many dollars. You can produce an incredible commercial for $100,000, but the talent in it is going to cost you millions. The Superbowl slot is going to cost you millions. I think a lot of Nikes power on a go forward basis is totally the scale economy stuff.…

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