Early Nike Women’s Advertising a Feminist Antenarrative.

The Gender of Branding: Early Nike Women’s Advertising a Feminist Antenarrative. 

From a branding perspective the ads function as living stories reflecting female experiences and providing its audience with "emotional promises” 

Nikes women’s sub-brand that often challenged the social constructions of gender and sports. 

In the early 1990s, female point of view was rarely reflected in advertising. While the creative team and Nike executives had the same objective of increasing market share among women, each had strongly differing views about how to achieve this. 

In 1990 when the women’s sub-brand was launched, Nike was a brand positioned as the patriarch of all sports, with the “Just Do It” tagline defining that identity. 

At the time of the launch of the women’s sub-brand, women’s professional sports were visually non-existent. Title IX, legislation passed in 1976 granting equal access to both genders in collegiate spots, was poorly implemented. 

Nike the parent brand is the men’s brand with line extensions for each sport, while the women’s brand represents a single sub-brand. 

In 1990 the sacred Nike parent brand was defined by its masculine emotion and promise… Masculine signifiers from sweating, muscle-bound male athletes, to body copy predicted on vigorous competition, with the “just do it” tagline as the ultimate signifier of this masculine promise. 

Women’s sub-brand, with its female-centric storytelling, was inevitably a source of tension.