In 2003, converse was acquired by Nike, but Nike did not directly intervene in converse's operation, nor did it change the personnel structure of the company's management. As usual, converse's annual sales in that year were only $205 million.
At that time, it was speculated that Nike's acquisition of converse was a strategic mistake. What the public doesn't know, however, is that Nike's big move is behind.
In the second year, Nike acquired players and channel resources accumulated by converse for many years, and also signed some young players as spokespersons of converse, and delivered them to Nike after they matured into stars, such as DwyaneWade and ChrisBosh.
In the period of the rise of retro trend, Nike led converse to reposition its products and put converse's classic retro shoes such as AllStar and JackPurcell into the casual fashion market.
At the same time, strengthen the scientific and technological content of the brand and form a professional team. On the other hand, using Nike's powerful marketing team and global sales network, converse finally ushered in a recovery.
The financial report released by Nike shows that Converse's annual income is as high as 2 billion, nearly ten times that of 205 million dollars when Nike just acquired it.
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Converse was the first brand to dominate the NBA. Although Adidas became the world's number one sports brand after 1950s, converse is a well-deserved overlord of American NBA. It can be seen from many photos and videos of that year that almost all NBA players played in converse sneakers in their early years.
In my opinion, another important reason why converse was able to lead the NBA before the 1970s was that basketball at that time was far less powerful than it is today, so Adidas, the industry leader at that time, did not pay attention to this market. These factors have created a relatively comfortable environment for the development of converse.
Comfortable environment means the lack of strong competition, which leads to the slow progress of converse's products. In the decades before Nike entered the NBA, converse basketball shoes have been constantly developing and improving, but there is almost no qualitative leap.
1982 Nike launches air force equipped with air cushion technology 1 basketball shoes. At that time, converse's products had little scientific content compared with Air Force 1.
Although Nike launched an epoch-making product in the 1980s, converse did not immediately realize the crisis. Because throughout the 1980 s, Converse had the best "Big Bird" and "Magic" Johnson as spokespersons in the league. At that time, Mr. Qiao was just a fledgling person. It was still several years before he won the first three consecutive championships and went to the altar. His strong market appeal has not yet emerged.
Therefore, even if Nike had the awesome products of Air Force and later Air Jordan series, Converse's products were still popular for a long time in the 1980s with the unparalleled market appeal of Bird and Johnson. It is precisely for this reason that converse's products still developed slowly in the 1990s, and its technology development was neither slow nor slow.
References:
Yang guang. Why did com _ converse decline from an industry giant to be acquired by Nike?