David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…No, I don't. These are not Air Birds. They weren't signature shoes. Nike says, we are going to make you a signature shoe, and then you are going to participate in the upside from that. They did that intentionally. It wasn't Jordan who asked for that, Nike wanted it that way. They thought, we need to incentivize Jordan to build the dream here. We need to tie this all together. It's brilliant counter positioning because all their competitors basically couldn't do it. Converse has too many stars to go all around signing these. You get some of the upside deals. Nike had freaking nothing to lose. Of course, they can give away some of the upside. If Converse is going to do this or Adidas is going to do this, they actually do have quite a bit to lose by giving away upside. Of course, Nike, it turns out, it was a big paycheck that they cut Jordan for years and years and years. But Nike was truly doing something here that their competitors could not, and it was smart to figure out what are the things that by being small, cash-constrained, and under penetrated in the NBA. What strengths do we have?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.