Product Management & Marketing - The Longest Race

A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to run the 4th Annual Nike Tel Aviv 10K night run. Now 10K isn't the longest distance in the world, but it is long enough to enjoy the atmosphere (amazing) and to reflect on many different things whilst running.

Sad to say perhaps, but, whilst pounding the streets I managed a few thoughts on product management.

Organising a run with over 15K runners is a real task - coordination with the city, the police, bands, official running shirts, refreshments, web site for registration and results - clearly a massive project & clearly some top class organisers were behind this event.

However, there were many product lessons to be learnt. The race organisers claimed that the other Nike night runs in Europe have been abandoned this year and that our race was the sole survivor. So clearly we see that there was some effective market segmentation and strong brand/product recognition in the local market.

On the subject of brand recognition Nike (not normally slow in these areas) let the competition steal a trick on them - guess which company managed to get its posters on lots of billboards along the route? (So a clue then - Adidas) - so some poor promotion & competitive positioning here.

One of the main questions that we should consider is what is the product and what is the Key Value Proposition that they were promoting? Trivially, this was a race, but probably that isn't really the intention of the organisers; it was probably more along the lines of

to produce a mass street happening in an important city; promoting an active good time to sporty people who are likely to identify with our brand. The aim is also to attract people who previously would not have taken part in an event like this to participate.

This emphasis makes for a completely different plan driving them towards providing bands and music along the route, promotion on Facebook even the choice of the date - 10.10.10.

The local product management obviously worked hard at getting buy in from stakeholders - both in house (Nike management) and outbound keeping the city interested despite this was no longer a global effort. Not to mention trying to maintain product momentum in keeping the customers (we runners) very happy.

I guess we will never know, but it would be interesting to find out - if with all the cross branding (water, yogurts and granola bars) & other cross product promotion (Nike stores) what were the financial objectives of the event? Did the race actually make a profit - not that this is necessarily the objective. It would be acceptable to under-take a loss making activity in the right context. It would also be interesting to know (given this was a unique event this year) whether there was a process of strategic review of alternatives.

So much for the planning and product development, in the next post I will discuss some of the results (product, not my personal time) and suggest some possible conclusions.