A Connect in FULL® lesson on why availability beats control

For fifty years, Nike mastered something most brands only dream of: inevitability.

Walk into any sports retailer, and Nike owned the wall. See athletic greatness, and Nike was there. Think “performance footwear,” and Nike came to mind first. The brand wasn’t just distributed—it was omnipresent. Woven into the fabric of how people discovered, compared, and chose athletic gear.

Nike didn’t just sell shoes. It controlled the ecosystem where purchase decisions happened.

Then, between 2020 and 2024, Nike systematically dismantled that power. Not through external forces or competitive pressure, but through strategic choices that seemed logical in isolation—and catastrophic in combination.

The result wasn’t just lost market share. Nike created the very ecosystem that allowed competitors to thrive.

The Great Retreat: Trading Presence for Control

The logic was seductive and familiar: Cut out intermediaries. Own the customer relationship. Drive higher margins through direct channels.

Starting in 2019, Nike began withdrawing from the wild:

Physical retreat: Exiting Amazon, reducing wholesale partnerships, deprioritising multi-brand retail. Nike abandoned the prime shelf space it had spent decades securing.

Mental retreat: Shifting from emotional brand building to performance marketing. Out went the cultural storytelling that built mental availability. In came the click-optimised creative designed to activate existing demand, not create it.

Strategic retreat: Moving from broad market presence to controlled, trackable environments. Nike bet it could bring customers to its owned channels rather than meeting them where they already shopped.

Each decision made sense in a boardroom. Together, they created what one former Nike executive called “a cannibal ecosystem that ate brand equity, product equity, gross margin, market share, and consumer connectivity.”

The Availability Vacuum: How Competitors Colonised Nike’s Territory

Here’s what happens when an apex predator abandons its habitat: other species move in.

Physical displacement: When Nike stepped back from retail, that shelf space didn’t stay empty. Hoka exploded in running—Nike’s former stronghold. On captured performance. New Balance seized lifestyle. Brands that couldn’t crack Nike’s fortress of premium placement suddenly had real estate handed to them.

Mental displacement: As Nike shifted to performance marketing, it stopped building the broad mental availability that makes brands come to mind first. When someone searches “running shoes” instead of “Nike running shoes,” the battle is already lost.

Economic displacement: Nike traded the economics of organic discovery for the expense of paid acquisition. Instead of customers finding Nike naturally in stores, Nike now pays Meta and Google for every customer interaction. They gave up free for expensive.

The numbers tell the story:

• Inventory spiralled from $6.5B to $10B as demand prediction collapsed
• Gross margins eroded 250 basis points in four quarters
• Black Friday became year-round clearance as Nike.com turned into a discount outlet

Nike didn’t just lose market share. It subsidised its competition’s growth.

The Strategic Error: Mistaking Control for Power

The deeper mistake was philosophical. Nike confused distribution control with brand strength.

For decades, Nike’s power came from inevitability. It was the default choice before customers even realised they were choosing. Brand power meant not having to fight for attention—you already had it.

Nike’s retreat forced a shift from inevitability to intentionality. Now customers must actively seek Nike out. Remember the brand name. Navigate to Nike.com. Choose Nike when alternatives are equally visible.

This isn’t just harder—it’s fundamentally different. It requires the very mental availability Nike abandoned for performance marketing.

Nike stopped building their brand, stopped putting their best products in front of consumers, and opened up space for the competition. It was a strategically coherent failure on every front.

The Connect in FULL Principle: Availability Equals Opportunity

Nike’s retreat violates a fundamental principle of brand building. In our Connect in FULL framework, everything starts with being Found. And being Found requires three types of availability:

Physical Availability: Being present where people shop, browse, and discover. When you’re not on shelves, you’re not in shopping journeys.

Mental Availability: Being present in people consideration set when a need arises. Brand building creates the mental shortcuts.

Cultural Availability: Being present in the stories, values, and conversations that shape preference. Culture is where brands earn the right to be chosen.

Nike dominated all three, then systematically retreated from each.

The lesson isn’t that DTC is wrong or that digital marketing doesn’t work. It’s that presence beats control. Brands grow in complex ecosystems, not controlled environments.

Nike Town wasn’t just a store—it was a brand experience where you could buy things, like the gift shop at an art gallery. It understood that physical presence shapes mental associations in ways that purely transactional channels cannot.

Rewilding the Brand: What Recovery Actually Requires

Nike’s return to Amazon signals recognition, not recovery. The real work of rewilding requires more than tactical channel expansion.

Rebuilding physical availability means fighting for shelf space you once took for granted. Other brands now occupy your former territory. They’ve built relationships with retailers you abandoned. Space must be earned, not assumed.

Rebuilding mental availability means returning to brand building when performance marketing has conditioned your organisation for short-term thinking. It means investing in unmeasurable mental associations when your systems are optimised for measurable conversion.

Rebuilding cultural availability means re-entering conversations where others now set the agenda. Nike retreated from culture as competitors like Hoka built meaning around authentic performance and On captured the zeitgeist of effortless style.

The wild doesn’t wait for you to return. It evolves without you.

The Warning for Every Brand Leader

Nike’s journey offers a stark lesson about the fragility of market dominance. When you retreat from the real world—whether to optimise margins, gain control, or improve measurement—you create opportunities for others.

The questions for every CMO and brand leader:

• Are you building presence or optimising control?
• Are you investing in availability or efficiency?
• Are you growing in the wild or retreating to the garden?

Because in the end, market power isn’t about owning the customer relationship. It’s about being present in the moments and places where relationships form.

The world is still wild. Your customers live there. If you want to influence them, be there too.

Nike’s mistake was thinking it could tame the ecosystem instead of thriving within it. Don’t make the same error. The brands that win are the ones that understand: presence is power, and the wild is where brands grow.