Phil Knight, the co-founder and former Chief Executive of Nike, prefers to let his superstar athletes and advertisements do his talking for him. Named Advertiser of the Year at the 50th Cannes International Advertising Festival, he is the first person to win the award twice.
Knight has an absolutely clear and commited strategy to use celebrity athlete endorsement. He describes it as one part of the "three-legged stool" which lies behind Nike's phenomenal growth since the early 1980's, with the other two being product design and advertising.
He has built Nike's expansion into sport after sport from its athletics roots on the back of the sporting masters: Carl Lewis on the track, tennis's Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, Tiger Woods, who led Nike into golf, Ronaldo and the Brazilizn national football team, and the basketball star, Michael Jordan, who famously rescued the company.
From the beginning Nike has been prepared to take a gamble on sporting bad boys others wouldn't touch: Andre Agassi springs to mind. It was a strategy that began with Ilie Nastase, the original tennis bad boy. The Romanian had the qu