It forgot how to market and tell authentic, compelling stories. The product is stale. That’s all occurring during a time when the marketplace is far more bifurcated & dispersed than it used to be. Consumers are harder to market to and they have an ever increasing number of options. All of this is further compounded by the law of large numbers. Growing a $50B company is much harder than growing a smaller company. A problem since all of Nike’s competitors are smaller.
Nike isn’t going away anytime soon. I do think however that it’s high single digit annual growth days may be over. If it’s struggling to retain those prior growth rates now when the economy is as good as its ever going to be it’s going to struggle when things slow. As they inevitably will. Working at a “We’re getting by I suppose” company is a very different proposition than working at a company that is still robustly growing. Regrettably I think the culture, job security, and the cache of Nike will be the biggest victims. We’re already seeing this and I don’t think that this time - unlike prior times - it’s just a small speed bump.
Nike’s demise has been predicted many times and the doubters have always been wrong. It feels different this time though. As if this time Nike, like any 70+ year old, isn’t going to bounce back quite like it used to.
An on point comment by @ima+1r9ze4AI.