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DAN WIEDEN: THE MAN BEHIND "JUST DO IT!"
4 key marketing lessons from the man behind the “Just Do It!” slogan
Niall Ratcliffe
April 28, 2024
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Morning!
I wanted to start by saying I appreciate you tuning in to read Growing Viral every week. We are closing in on 4000 subscribers, which is pretty cool.
But I want to hear from you, so hit reply and let me know what breakdowns you enjoy or your favourite breakdown I’ve done - I’d love to chat!
Anyway, on to today’s breakdown…
I recently stumbled across the marketer who crafted the infamous tagline “Just Do It!”.
It’s easily the greatest tagline of all time, so I thought… he must know a thing or two about marketing.
4 heavy hours of research later…
Here are 4 key marketing lessons from the man behind the “Just Do It!” slogan:
LISTEN TO THE AUDIO VERSION
BREAKING DOWN THE STRATEGY
In 1987, Dan Wieden was tasked with creating a pitch for Nike’s first major TV campaign.
He and the team had put some great ads together, but for Dan… it was just missing something. Something to tie it all together.
He just couldn’t put his finger on it. So, he took an hour off to read the newspaper.
He began reading an article about a man from his hometown - Portland - who had just murdered a couple at a gas station. The man was arrested and put before a firing squad. But right before the guns started firing, he said, “Let’s do it.”
Click. That was it.
The campaign needed a slogan and Dan had just read the perfect line.
After a bit of chopping and changing, Dan presented the line ‘Just Do It!’ to Nike alongside the campaign they’d created.
They loved it and quickly ushered it into being a brand tagline.
Today, nearly 40 years on, that tagline is easily the most famous brand tagline of all time.
But Dan Wieden wasn’t just a one-hit-wonder, he went on to create infamous campaigns for Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Facebook, Procter & Gamble, and more.
He’s one of the greatest marketers to ever live - yet very few people know him.
So, I spent the last 4 hours watching his interviews, reading his lessons, and analysing his work.
Here are 4 of his greatest campaigns + the key lessons we can learn from them:
Lesson 1: Don’t Seem Like a Brand, Position as a Human.
Dan pretty much hated corporate branding.
He once said,
“If a brand isn’t human, it’s not really worth shit.”
And I think he was pretty bob-on.
For years, brands spent millions of dollars trying to build this “perfect” look to the outside world. Then over the last 5 years, we’ve seen each brand’s perfect persona torn down by one controversy after another.
You know what would solve that problem? Just being a tad more human.
Dan’s first-ever Nike TV commercial is a prime example of that:
No fancy cuts. No studio shots. No fancy editing.
Just Walt. An 80-year-old man. That just does it.
You don’t get much more human than that.
Lesson 2: Create Conflict OR An Us vs. Them
By 2006, Apple was a pretty big player in the computer space. But they were still having problems differentiating themselves from other computers.
That was until Dan created the “I am a Mac” campaign.
The campaign was simple.
The man on the right was:
Trendy
Young
Healthy
The man on the left was:
Corporate
Old
Traditional
And had just caught a “virus”.
The ad starts with the guy on the right saying “I’m a Mac”, while the man on the left says, “I’m a PC”.
Again, it’s a simple ad with just 2 men in a white studio. Yet it perfectly creates this conflict of:
A) Modern-day innovators and young tech guys who use Macs
Vs
B) Stiff corporates who use the classic computers
This is also masterful differentiation here too.
Notice how you refer to all other brands of computers as “Laptops” or “PCs” yet with Apple products you call them “Macbooks” or a “Mac”.
It’s the computer equivalent of saying “Let me GOOGLE it”.
It’s ads like this that made that happen.
Lesson 3: Find A Way To Tie Into Culture
Too many marketers think marketing has to be linear. You run a campaign → you make sales.
But if it was that easy, we’d all be trillionaires.
Dan is a huge believer in campaigns that do more than just push a product or a brand, but instead tie into 1 of 2 categories:
1/ Empowerment - They highlight an issue in the world and tie the brand to the battle against that issue.
Example: This ad he created for Coca-Cola
2/ They Tie Into Culture - The campaign gets involved with a key talking point at the minute.
You see this a lot nowadays with brands like Patagonia and Ben & Jerry’s.
While it’s not my favourite approach to marketing, it works.
People who are on board with that mission start supporting the brand.
Supporters who are aligned on the mission begin to love the brand even more.
That’s without mentioning that it becomes a behavioural trigger for people to think about the brand.
When you think of saving the planet → You think of Patagonia.
Wieden loved this approach.
Lesson 4: When You Can, Inject Humour
In the early 2000s, sales of Old Spice soap products were gradually declining.
The major issue: 60% of their customers were women buying for their partners.
If they were going to survive, they had to find a way to engage men with their brand.
That’s when Wieden came up with the ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ campaign.
The goal of the campaign was to lift shower gel sales by 15%. But it ended up rocketing them by over 60% - making it one of the top campaigns of the 21st century.
Why did it work? It was genuinely funny.
One piece of advice that Wieden preached throughout the interviews I watched was to break all the rules of advertising.
Don’t try to be cool, fancy or persuasive. Just talk to your target audience in a way that resonates with them.
For Old Spice, this was through humour.
This campaign single-handledly turned the Old Spice ship around and today they are one of the biggest soap brands on the planet.
🌱 THE GREENHOUSE
Things I’ve saved this week that are worth seeing:
TL;DR
1/ Don’t Seem Like a Brand
2/ Create Conflict
3/ Find A Way To Tie Into Culture
4/ When You Can, Inject Humour
Truly one of the greatest marketers to ever live, yet I seriously haven’t heard anyone talk of him.
If you give him a quick Google you’ll realise just how many infamous campaigns he was behind.
Hopefully, hearing a little about him helped you learn something.
And if you did learn something, why not share this breakdown with a friend?
Until next Sunday.
— Niall
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