What If Nike Stopped Advertising For One Week?

I’ve often wondered what would happen to some of these giants in their markets if they took one week off of advertising. For most markets, there are kings. Some may debate over who the king is, or maybe say that there are multiple kings, but everyone pretty well knows who these kings are…usually.

To list just a couple of these, as the name of the post already hinted at, nike is clearly king of their market. There are of course competitors, as any good company has, but none come close to the market share Nike has. I haven’t looked recently, but I think last I checked, the second closest to Nike was Addidas, and their revenue was about half of Nike’s. Of course, people may argue that there are different markets, etc. Whatever. The point is, when I say the name “Nike”, and you can say “just do it”, you know that they’ve done their job in the advertising world.

Another huge one might be Mcdonalds. Sure, Burger King and Wendy’s may be competitors, you may even like them a thousand times better, but neither of them come close to the hold Mcdonalds has.

There are other giants like this, but I’m really looking for any company that, when you hear it, you know exactly who I’m talking about and you can probably picture a few commercials or billboards for them.

What would happen to these giants if they took one week off their marketing? Everyone on the marketing team took a week off. They didn’t play any commercials for a week, no new billboards went up.

What would happen to the company?

In 2018, Nike spent 1.44 billion dollars on advertising in the US alone. Over 3 billion globally. If you split that up throughout the year, one week of that budget would be about 27.7 million dollars.

Think about that for a second. Almost 30 million dollars are spent in one week of marketing. I know that’s not exactly how marketing works and different events and such simply make that cost what it is. But this is the easiest way to split it up.

Would Nike see a visible drop in sales if they did this? Would they have to lay people off because of it? On the other hand, would it boost morale? Would it create a wave of new ideas and innovation within the marketing teams?

Smarter people than me I’m sure can answer this question, and if you’re one of them, I’m all ears, but unless it’s tried, I’ll continue to be curious about the repercussions of an undetaking like this.