Despite trying for the past two decades, I’ve never come close to boiling everything I believe about marketing into a statement so efficient as the following one I read in the NY Times this morning in an article about Nike and where they are spending their “advertising” dollars these days.:
“We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive,” (Trevor Edwards, Nike’s corporate vice president for global brand and category management) says he tells many media executives. “We’re in the business of connecting with consumers.”
Only change I would suggest: Instead of using the word consumers, use the word runners.
October 15th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
[...] Rex Hammock high-fives Nike on its statement about where its money is going, but calls them out a little bit on semantics. ’nuff said. [...]
October 15th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Rex, in a newspaper column in 2005, I wrote: “I don’t see us in the newspaper business. We’re in the business of connecting communities: people to information, people to other people, and buyers to sellers. We use newspapers and the Internet. We use the printed word, audio through podcasting, and visuals with photography and video.
“It’s all still journalism.”
The local alt weekly laughed at that. I wish I had worded it more sharply, but I still believe it today.