Marketing Overseas

Marketing Overseas

Introduction

Nike, Inc. is one of the most popular sports apparel brand. Nike is an American based multinational company which is currently manufacturing various designs of sports apparel, footwear, accessories, equipment and services. The headquarter of the company is based in Oregon and is one of the two Oregon companies which is listed in fortune 500. The company is the top manufacturer and supplier of sports footwear and apparel; it is also one of the top sports equipment manufacturer and supplier.

The company has an overall revenue of 24.1 billion U.S.D, which has made it is the top sports brand of the world. The company sells its product through two means firstly it sells its products through its own franchises and retail stores in various cities of the countries and secondly, it provides its merchandise to big brands such as Wal-Mart to keep their share and sell the products of Nike at retail prices.

Nike is amongst the very few sports apparel with Adidas, Puma and Reebok which supply its products in all parts of the world. In the last two decades Nike has expanded its target market from Europe and USA towards the Asian region as it has very high population. The marketing strategy, quality and products are slightly different from the western targeted markets. The country of focus in this paper is India which has an overall population of greater than 1 billion and how Nike has planned its steps to capture the sports apparel market of India (Ahmed, 2012).

Discussion

Asia is the most densely populated continent of the world and India is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. India's foreign policy till the 90s did not allowed any of the international brands or multinationals to export their products in this region, however, in the past 10 to 15 years the demographics of import and export have changed in this part of the world. India does allow multinationals to operate in their country but only if the rates are suitable for their public.

Nike is although the leading sports apparel brand of the world but its market position in India is not very string as 50% of the market share is possessed by Reebok, followed by Adidas which has 20% of the share and Nike holds currently 155 of market share in India.

Nike has maintained a differing stance for both sides of the world. Third world country was targeted differently from the European zone and the USA. However, for India the stance was different as the marketing scheme for India was similar to the developed countries as Indian market was also divided in three segments (Babu, 2012).

The three segments is such that firstly Nike operates and sells its products through its own retail stores, secondly, Nike has licensed many of the popular stores of India to sell its product on retail price by keeping a certain commission for them and thirdly, Nike has also operated its online stores for the Indian ...