Business Management Case Study — Nike Strategy
Introduction to Organizational Strategy on Women’s Fitness
The current organizational strategy of Nike with respect to women’s fitness comprises a shift in seven specific aspects of its approach. In principle, it marks a shift away from the previous isolated initiative-based concept toward an integrated portfolio-based concept. That includes establishing a permanent prominence of brand loyalty instead of a series of inconsistent relationships as well as a shift toward of color-based selections. Mike also hopes to establish a consistent retail experience at the global level. Finally, the organization intends to rectify inconsistent and inadequate dedication of resources and to move away from the isolated business opportunity-based approach toward an integrated acceleration of global business opportunities.
Outline of Problems Encountered
According to the general manager of Nike’s global women’s fitness component, some of the problems encountered in implementing the new strategy included difficulties in connection with working across traditional boundaries within the organization’s complex, matrixed structure to establish the necessary cross-business integration to be able to establish an integrated or cohesive collection of products including footwear, apparel, and sports-related equipment for the women’s market. In that regard, other specific barriers included organizing and coordinating many disparate product units and business units and many different operation sites located in remote geographic regions to share a common schedule and to work collaboratively toward a common organizational goal. In the process, the organization also had to overcome leadership challenges that emerged as well as extensive need for manual interventions and workarounds.
Possible Problem with Current Strategies
The most obvious conceptual problem is that two of Nike’s current goals seem to conflict. Namely, it’s expressed intention to increase the integration of it products and product lines and its simultaneous intention to further differentiate its women’s “fitness” product lines by specific fitness interest. In principle, both initiatives make sense: increasing overall integration builds brand loyalty and cross-over consumer interest. However, because Nike determined that women “don’t do fitness” because they focus much more narrowly on particular fitness interests, the company decided to cater to that specificity by developing dedicated product lines for different women’s fitness and women’s fitness-related interests. At the operational level, achieving both of those objectives simultaneously might prove challenging.
Internal Problem Analysis
The principal problems faced by Nike had to do with the highly isolated and segmented nature of its many different business units. Generally, they operated on entirely different production schedules determined by the different parameters of their target sports interest and their respective product development operations were equally isolated from one another. Collaboration, to the extent it existed, was mainly a function of specific initiatives in which multiple business units contributed products, such as to Olympic-year initiatives. More specifically, with respect to the new emphasis on women’s fitness, there were internal issues in relation to the long-standing domination of and concerns that emphasizing women’s fitness could erode the strength of its male-oriented product lines.
