David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…And the Nike mobile store. Huge user base, all started at this moment in time where they realized (a) we should be in technology, and (b) we should be making acquisitions not of other brands but of technologies that we can integrate to help us extend our brand and participate more in the lives of our customers. The other thing, and this is a little bit later, this is more of the 2013–2014 era, they pulled the trigger on this big strategy shift away from what Phil Knight had pioneered with the retail relationships to go direct. Nike started to realize, in this new era, this internet era, this global era, where you have to be at scale to execute certain strategies, they're going to be the player at scale, that can execute a direct strategy, that can operate nike.com to sell shoes directly to customers, that can operate retail stores and all these different places to go directly to customers. They're not all the way there, and I think there’s a lot of like we'll talk and there a bear-bull case about where they are in that transition and how successful it will be. There is this tipping point where a brand becomes the scale player. Think about Disney in media. They've become the scale player. They can run a different playbook and go directly to customers in a way where other places that make content need to integrate with the existing distribution channels. Disney can make a 10-, 15-year transition, especially with the right technology to go direct. Nike's basically betting that they're also one of these hero brands that can run that playbook. For context, today, Nike is more than twice the size of Adidas, who is more than three times, I think, the size of the number three player, which is Skechers maybe. Yup, it's super power law–distributed.…

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