I'm a fan of micro- segmentation in marketing, but Nike's latest shoe has reached a new level. They discovered that Native American feet are much wider and higher than the average American, so they developed the Nike Air Native N7 shoe, even using traditional colors.
I've been joking for years that call centers should have separate teams for separate dialects, just to make everybody feel at home. But this goes beyond emotional comfort - this shoe supposedly provides greater physical comfort for Native Americans, even though they make up less than 1% of the US population.
A call center owner might say, "Why appeal to the minority? Let's do what pleases the most people, and we'll make the most money."
Not so. By that reasoning, Pepsi-Cola should try to make their product taste exactly like the better-selling Coca-Cola. But they don't. They could never become the best-selling slightly-bitter cola drink (that would be Coke), but they succeeded in becoming the best-selling fairly-sweet cola.
I think a business does best, not when it appeals the numer one overcrowded market segment, but to the number two underexploited market segment.
Certainly, you can go too far in micro-segmentation, spending more time and money than the small market is worth. The amount of time, effort and money that Nike must have spent to develop the Nike Air Native shoes... well, they must be counting on high loyalty and market penetration. I told you about the time I fixed some long distance phone problems for some Navajos - about 20 of them, to be precise. But they were our customers, so we did it.
Of course, the company I was working for is now out of business.
The vast majority of the people with Native American genetic heritage and resulting very wide feet aren't counted in your statistics on Native population. They aren't affiliated with tribes or reservations, and I would bet most of them don't even realize Native genes are the reason why they are suffering with feet so wide the real reason they need these shoes is not diabetes or obesity, but foot deformities and pain from ill-fitting shoes. Do you and Nike really believe Native American people just disappeared? Native American ancestors are a part of a lot of us, and most of us don't even know it. Nike is stupid beyond belief to promote shoes for which there is a substantial market made up of people who truly need them, and then tell those people they can't have them because they have no tribal connections. People are begging for these shoes all over the internet. Nike is making some bad public relations with this bonehead move, but Nike's thinking error is apparently common, since you also make it.
Posted by: Anonymous | October 1, 2007 2:20 AM | Permalink to Comment