The world's largest sports shoe and clothing business on Thursday pledged to continue using marketing relationships with leading athletes to build its brands, as it restated its support for Tiger
Woods.
Omar Saad, an analyst at Credit Suisse, said in a research note this week that Tiger Woods' problems could lead to Nike and other companies rethinking the effectiveness of celebrity
relationships. But CEO Mark Parker said that Nike's relationships with star athletes "are really critical to developing the insights [that] fuel the product innovation that really distinguishes us in
the market place and ultimately the overall business performance of the company.
"This is a strategy that works," he said, adding that the company continued to assess the economics of
sponsorship.
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