Which Window Is Nike In?

Two manuscripts are open on my screen tonight, nudged up in the corner, beckoning me to make more progress.

The one on the left is the one I owe you. The one on the right is the one I keep drifting back to, especially recently.

The left-hand file is the second edition of the Marketing Orchestration Playbook, the book that used to carry the Brandflow name and now stands on its own. It will be out before the end of the year. I know that because I have now said it out loud, and the only reason the first edition exists is that I said that out loud too (and Nextverse Press is waiting). Public promises are the most reliable editor I have.

The right-hand file is a book I started more than a year ago and have not talked about until now. It is called Reviving Icons. It will be ready in 2027, and I want to tell you what is in it, partly because it is topical and mostly because I would like your help finishing it.

I have come to believe there are two kinds of marketer. The first wants to build the new thing: the launch, the category nobody has named, the brand with no past to answer to. The second wants to be handed something that other people built, and to take up the mantle that comes with it. The parents of the brand who came before you. The ones who will come after. The responsibility of leaving it better than you found it.

I am very much the second kind, and I have been since long before I knew there was a choice. On the agency side I gravitated towards Mercedes-Benz and Nivea when both had history to live up to (let alone reviving some dusty agency brands too). If this is the kind of marketer I am, then I am blessed with the family of brands I have had the opportunity to protect and grow. On the client side, in Atlanta in 2003, I was one of a small group who wrote a call to arms for Coca-Cola, The Manifesto for the Revival of an Icon, and then had to go and enact it. I wrote about the question that room left me with in The Grief Test in May: if this brand disappeared tomorrow, would anyone grieve? The book is what happens when you take that question to twenty-eight brands and ask what the ones that came back actually did.

Not every brand you inherit is in trouble. Most are not. But some are, and when an iconic one falls the question is not whether it can grow. It is whether it can be brought back at all, and by whom, and before when.

That is the book.

I set out to find one pattern. Twenty-eight cases across food and drink, luxury, technology, cars, sport and media; sixteen countries; six decades. Twenty-one of them have become chapters.

I expected the successful revivals to share a handful of moves, and they do: who was hired, what was cut, where the money went, what was left alone. The pattern is operational, not theoretical, and it is learnable. Adidas has faced its crisis twice, and the person who closed the 2023 window had worked inside the 1993 revival. The same method, applied by the same hands, a generation apart.

What I did not expect was that the window itself is not one thing. Every fallen icon enters a period in which it still holds enough cultural equity, consumer belief and institutional talent to be rebuilt. Once that period closes, no amount of money or talent restores what was lost. But the window comes in five shapes, and the book is organised around them, from the crisis everyone can see to the crisis no one can.

A. The Narrow Window. The brand is visibly dying, the window is measured in months, and someone acts before it shuts. Apple, Gucci, Puma, Marvel, Old Spice, Royal Enfield. It is the revival everyone recognises, and its clarity is misleading, because it teaches you to wait for a crisis that announces itself.

B. The Held-Open Window. The company stopped deserving the brand years ago, and its co-authors kept the window open until someone earned it back. Harley-Davidson’s riders. LEGO’s builders. Levi’s wearers. Converse, under an owner who knew when to stay out of the way. Several of these brands were saved by people who did not work for the company, which is the quiet rebuke to every saviour-CEO story ever written.

C. The Narrowing Window. The window is closing faster than the revenue line shows, because the brand’s meaning is being contaminated, often from inside. Burberry. Snapple. The only escape is to read the culture before the numbers confirm it. This is the darkest movement in the book.

D. The Repeated Window. Brands that have faced it more than once. Dior, Cadbury, Nintendo, FIAT, Adidas. These chapters ask whether revival can be built into an institution, or whether every crisis needs its own hero.

E. The Invisible Window. The commercial metrics say nothing is wrong, or nothing is available, and only a cultural reading reveals the window at all. Loewe. Birkenstock, whose product never changed while culture came to it. Guinness. And Coca-Cola in 2003, a brand whose sales were healthy and whose meaning was quietly draining away. That is the one I lived. It is the hardest to see and the one the book most wants to teach.

The argument underneath all five is the one most likely to irritate the CFOs who read this. Iconic brands are not the same as strong brands. A strong brand delivers functional value and emotional association. An iconic one provides an identity myth: it stands for a view of life beyond its category, it turns up in conversations and art that have nothing to do with the product, and its meaning is co-authored by the company, its subcultures and its customers together. Which means the company is not its owner so much as its steward. The revivalists who succeed behave like cultural archaeologists. The ones who fail treat the brand as a line item.

I know how that sounds in a budget meeting, so here is the test that keeps it honest. Best Buy’s recovery under Hubert Joly took the stock from roughly $11 to $110 between 2012 and 2019. It is one of the great corporate turnarounds of the century and it is not in the book, because it fails all three tests. Nobody tattoos Best Buy. A revival is a specific thing, and most turnarounds are not one.

The financial-ownership question cuts the same way. Private equity does not kill icons; misdiagnosis does. Investcorp read Gucci’s window correctly. Nike read Converse’s. Kraft Heinz misread the state of the window it had bought and wrote down $15.4 billion in 2019. The playbook was not the problem. The reading was.

The failures are not chapters. Each lives inside a success story as its shadow. Kodak aimed an open window at the wrong future, in the early 2000s, long before the 2012 bankruptcy. Blockbuster’s fatal decision was not passing on Netflix in 2000; it was reversing the online strategy that was working, in 2007. Nokia, a former employer of mine, lost its window not when a competitor launched a phone but when that competitor’s developer ecosystem became impossible to catch. Reebok never built a window to reopen. Tupperware’s community was real, loyal and still not enough. Bud Light, in April 2023, showed that a window can collapse in a day.

Two things follow. The moment of no return is never the bankruptcy filing; it is an earlier, undramatic decision, or the absence of one, years before the headlines. And an open window is necessary but not sufficient. JCPenney had a credible leader, abundant capital and loyal customers, and in 2012 it cancelled the ritual its customers had co-authored, the coupon and the thrill of the deal, nationally, untested. Revenue fell by about a quarter in a year. The window was open. The intervention closed it.

On 21 September 2026 Nike left the S&P 100 after eighteen years in it. The stock is down almost 40 per cent in 2026 and the company is worth roughly a fifth of what it was at the end of 2021. Elliott Hill is two years into a turnaround that analysts describe, as of October 2026, as slower than expected. Nike has no chapter in the book and is present on almost every page: as the myth that made Reebok unrevivable, as the owner whose restraint made Converse, as the competitor both Adidas revivals measured themselves against.

So run it past the five. Is Nike in a Narrow window, visibly dying with months to act? That does not feel right for a company of its scale. Is it Repeated, given the stumbles of the mid-1980s and the late 1990s, and does the institution still remember how it got out? Is it Narrowing, with the meaning eroding faster than the revenue line can show? Or was it Invisible, the numbers lagging a culture that had already moved on?

I have an answer. I am keeping it for the Introduction, because the book is written to age honestly and I would rather be judged on the reasoning than on the call. What I can tell you is that the five types gave me a way to argue about it properly, and until I had them I only had an opinion, like everyone else.

The chapters are being edited through the festive season, which means there is still time for the book to be better than it is tonight. Twenty-eight cases is a lot and it is not the world. The research reached further into the UK, the US and Western Europe than anywhere else, and I would bet money that readers in Sydney, São Paulo, Mumbai and Tokyo know icons it never touched.

So, two requests. Which revival did I miss: a brand that fell, had a worldview beyond its category and people who fought for it, and came back? And which brand in desperate need of revival should I be looking at now, before its window closes? Reply to this email or put it in the thread. The ones that pass the three tests will get a closer look, and some of them may end up in print.

The Playbook comes first. I owe you that one. But the right-hand file is the one I keep opening at this hour, and I suspect that proves which kind of marketer I am.

The moment of no return is never the bankruptcy filing. It is a quiet decision, years before the headlines.

Which fallen icon, anywhere in the world, have I missed?

Agree? Disagree? The thread is open on the web. I answer every comment, and the best ones become the next edition.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry’s table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. It is read twice weekly by senior marketing and agency leaders, a good many of them the second kind. Every Monday and Thursday: brandflow-marketing.com.