耐克广告语的灵感来源
Nike’s “Just do it” slogan is undoubtedly a killer line – and now it’s been revealed that the inspiration for it came from an actual killer.
The phrase, first used in a Nike advertisement in 1988, was brought to the firm by advertising executive Dan Wieden, who admitted that it was borrowed from something a Utah murderer spoke as he faced a firing squad. The murderer in question was Gary Gilmore, who was sentenced to death in 1977 for robbing and killing two men in Utah the previous year.
Mr Wieden, speaking at an advertising conference in Cape Town in February, said that he recalled this line in 1988 just before he had a marketing campaign meeting with Nike bosses, and decided to suggest a slightly changed version as a slogan. His company had been sent in by Nike to help them fight back rivals Reebok, who had just announced bigger profits.
Mr Wieden said: “We… came up with five different 30 second spots. The night before a meeting with Nike I got concerned because… there wasn’t a strong connection to them all. Some were funny, some were serious. So I thought… we need a tagline to pull them together. I wrote about four or five ideas. I narrowed it down to the last one, which was ‘Just do it’. The reason I did that one was funny because I was recalling a man in Portland. He murdered a man and a woman, and was put before a firing squad. And they asked him if he had any final thoughts and he said: ‘Let's do it.’ And for some reason I didn’t like ‘Let’s do it’ so I just changed it to ‘Just do it’.”
At first, he recalled, Nike hated the idea, but he won them round and the slogan appeared at the end of an advert featuring 80-year-old runner Walt Stack. It is now one of the most famous slogans in the world, described by Campaign magazine as “arguably the best tagline of the 20th century”.