Keep Your Ear to the Ground
How strong brands know when the world is moving with them — and when the brand is moving away from itself.
Executive Perspectives 004Keep Your Ear
to the Ground
There is something rather extraordinary happening at Nike.
One of the world's greatest sports brands is talking about going back to sport.
When Elliott Hill returned as CEO in 2024, Nike says bringing the company back to its sporting roots and refocusing on the athlete were at the top of his agenda. In 2026, Nike described its once-clear mandate to be steeped in sport, listening to and serving athletes, as having become 'murky.' President Amy Montagne now uses a wonderfully simple filter: how does this connect back to sport and athletes?
That word - murky - interests me.
Because Nike did not forget how to make a Swoosh. It didn't lose Just Do It. It didn't suddenly stop having extraordinary athletes, designers, products, innovation or global recognition.
Something subtler happened.
The organisation's understanding of the brand can begin to drift away from the source of meaning that made the brand valuable in the first place.
The most dangerous drift may be the kind that works
Brand drift rarely begins with an obviously terrible decision. Usually the opposite.
A new opportunity appears. A channel is growing rapidly. Culture is changing. A campaign generates extraordinary attention. A new audience becomes important. Competitors are moving. Management wants growth. Somebody makes a perfectly reasonable decision. And it works.
Nike's 2018 Colin Kaepernick campaign is interesting for precisely this reason. It was provocative, politically charged and enormously visible. It also generated attention and initially accompanied strong commercial performance.
But there is another question that financial performance immediately after a campaign cannot answer: did the decision build the source of the brand's equity - or did it successfully spend some of it?
Revenue tells you whether something sold. Engagement tells you whether people reacted. Research can tell you whether people remembered it. But none of those measures, by themselves, answers a more fundamental brand question: Did it make Nike more Nike?
The most dangerous brand drift may be the kind that works at first.
“The most dangerous brand drift may be the kind that works at first.”
What made Nike Nike?
Nike's organising idea was remarkably pure: athletic endeavour.
Not merely elite athletes. Not simply winning Olympic medals or NBA championships. The genius was making the spirit of athletic endeavour available to ordinary human beings.
You didn't have to be Michael Jordan. You just had to do it.
Product innovation, design, competition, aspiration, sweat, failure, courage, improvement and extraordinary human performance could all live inside that world. Fashion could grow from it. Music could touch it. Street culture could reinterpret it. But sport remained the centre of gravity.
Culture can extend a brand. It can also distract from it. The leadership responsibility is knowing which is happening.
Athlete or activist?
This isn't an argument about transgender people, conservative politics, progressive politics or which side of a particular social debate happens to be fashionable this year. That would miss the point entirely.
Nike's 2016 campaign featuring Chris Mosier, for example, involved a transgender athlete pursuing elite sporting achievement. Whatever anybody's politics, the organising story was recognisably Nike: the athlete, the challenge, the endeavour.
Years later, Nike's paid partnership with social-media personality Dylan Mulvaney promoting Nike women's sportswear generated a very different cultural response.
The Brand GP question isn't whether one person's identity is acceptable and another's isn't. It is much simpler: what is the organising idea of the communication? Is the athlete carrying the cultural story, or has the cultural story begun carrying the brand?
That distinction can appear academic until it is repeated across hundreds of decisions. Then it becomes brand direction. And eventually brand equity.
On-brand calibration
Athlete → endeavour → sport → Nike.
Identity may be present, but the organising idea remains athletic performance.
Brand drift risk
Culture → controversy → attention → brand.
The social story becomes the organising idea and the brand follows it.
Cultural relevance is not brand relevance
There is tremendous pressure on global organisations to participate. A cultural movement gathers momentum. Social media accelerates it. Employees care about it. Agencies see an opportunity. Competitors respond. The media asks questions. Silence itself can suddenly be interpreted as a position.
But cultural relevance is not automatically brand relevance.
A strong brand already has values. It already has history. It has customers. It has accumulated associations. It has earned permission to occupy certain territory in people's minds.
Leadership's responsibility is not to bolt every contemporary value onto that structure. It is to understand the brand deeply enough to determine which changes genuinely express it, which credibly extend it and which begin pulling it somewhere else.
That applies equally in either political direction. If tomorrow Nike attempted to turn Just Do It into a vehicle for conservative politics, I would ask exactly the same question: Why? What has this got to do with Nike?
Keep your ear to the ground
International brand leadership taught me this long before we had dashboards capable of measuring almost everything.
I've worked with brands across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Nordics and Europe. And one thing becomes apparent very quickly when you cross enough borders: headquarters never knows everything.
A global positioning can look beautifully coherent in a presentation and mean something surprisingly different when you walk into a shop in Kuala Lumpur, speak to a dealer in Finland, watch customers in Dubai or discover what people actually value about a product in South Africa.
Customers know things. Dealers know things. Salespeople know things. Competitors tell you things through what succeeds. Culture tells you things through behaviour rather than PowerPoint.
The best brand leaders therefore keep their ear to the ground. Not because customers should run the company. Not because every cultural shift deserves a brand response. And certainly not because popular opinion is strategy.
They listen because the distance between what an organisation believes its brand means and what its customers believe it means can become extraordinarily expensive.
The strength of a great brand can hide its weakening
Great brands can absorb mistakes. In fact, the greater the accumulated equity, the longer an organisation may be able to make questionable decisions without experiencing their full consequences.
People still recognise the Swoosh. They still love their Jordans. Athletes still wear Nike. Millions of customers have decades of memories attached to the brand. The machine keeps moving.
The strength of the brand can temporarily hide the cost of weakening it.
Meanwhile, other decisions compound the problem. Nike's aggressive move towards direct-to-consumer and digital distribution reduced its wholesale presence. Competitors gained ground. Product and marketplace priorities shifted.
In fiscal 2025, Nike's revenue fell 10% to $46.3 billion. In fiscal 2026, total revenue stabilised at $46.4 billion, while Nike Direct remained under pressure. These numbers do not prove that brand drift caused every result. They show why, when several parts of a business are changing simultaneously, the organising idea of the brand becomes more important, not less.
It should be the stabilising force.
Brand equity is accumulated commercial memory
We sometimes speak about brand essence and brand equity as though they belong to the softer end of business. They don't.
Brand equity is accumulated commercial memory.
It is the result of millions of interactions, products, experiences, communications and decisions gradually teaching people what something means. For a global brand, that takes decades and billions to build.
Once established, it influences preference before a customer enters a store, searches online, reads a specification or compares a price. That is commercial value.
Which means allowing that meaning to drift isn't merely a marketing problem. It is spending capital. And recovering it can be enormously expensive.
Does this strengthen the brand we are responsible for building?
Governance before recovery
This is one of the reasons I developed Brand GP.
Not to freeze brands in time. Not to tell leadership which political opinions to hold. And certainly not to replace human judgement with another score on a dashboard.
Its purpose is to maintain a consistent reference point as an organisation changes: to examine whether strategy, communication, language and design are continuing to reinforce the source of brand value - or gradually pulling apart.
A proposed decision might be culturally exciting. Commercially attractive. Creatively brilliant. Popular internally. It may even produce an immediate sales spike.
But there should still be one brutally simple question: Does this strengthen the brand we are responsible for building?
Evolution should compound brand equity, not consume it.
Back to sport
There is something encouraging about Nike's current language.
Its leadership isn't talking as though the company needs to invent an entirely new reason to exist. It is talking about returning to sport. Listening to athletes. Serving athletes. Organising the business around sport. Reigniting innovation and brand momentum through sport.
Perhaps forty years of exceptional brand building has created enough accumulated goodwill for Nike to correct course. I hope so.
Because Nike remains one of the great examples of what branding can achieve when product, performance, design, language, culture and human ambition reinforce one another.
The lesson isn't don't change. It is know what you are changing from.
The best brand leaders don't just know what their brand is supposed to mean. They keep finding out what it actually means.
Keep your ear to the ground. Because by the time brand drift appears clearly on the balance sheet, you may already be paying to recover what good governance could have protected.
Sources & Notes
Nike's current “back to sport” language and the description of its mandate becoming “murky” are from Nike's May 2026 profile of Amy Montagne. Financial figures are from NIKE, Inc. FY2025 and FY2026 full-year results. The Dylan Mulvaney partnership is documented in Marketing-Interactive's April 2023 coverage. The interpretation and Brand GP diagnosis in this Perspective are Boyd Benkenstein's.
Nike — Amy Montagne: The Force Returning Nike to Sport
NIKE, Inc. FY2025 results
NIKE, Inc. FY2026 results
Marketing-Interactive — Nike / Dylan Mulvaney coverage
Executive Perspectives
Executive Perspectives is a series exploring the relationship between leadership, commercial strategy and brand performance — through observations developed over nearly three decades of international practice across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
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