Nike began a new chapter of its own history this week when it tinkered with the slogan that has served it well for 37 years. Introduced in 1988, “Just Do It” was among the best known catchlines in marketing history, enjoying an 82.3% recognition rate, according to a 2018 poll by Survata.
If the change is a bold move, it’s also a measured one. “Just Do It” has become “Why Do It,” but the essential component—“do it”—remains.
Mostly forgotten, however, is how it got there in the first place.
“Just Do It” was an adaptation of “Let’s do it,” the final words spoken by spree killer Gary Gilmore shortly before his execution in 1977.
Had almost any other ad executive pitched that one, it might never have made it out of the conference room. But in this case, the adman was Dan Wieden, cofounder of Wieden+Kennedy.
In 1988, Wieden & Kennedy (the plus sign would come later) was a six-year-old firm taking great care of its marquee client, Nike, which Wieden and Dave Kennedy had taken with them after they left rival shop William Cain. As Weiden recalled in a 2015 interview with design magazine Dezeen, by 1988, Nike had finally thrown serious money at a new campaign—and he’d been up all night worrying. Wieden had put five teams on the job, each creating its own spot. The ads were fine, but didn’t function coherently as a group.
“We need a tagline to pull this stuff together,” Wieden thought.
It was then the creative exec recalled a quote carried widely in national media 11 years before. In 1977, the state of Utah imposed the death penalty on Gilmore, who’d murdered a gas-station attendant and a hotel manager. Gilmore’s execution made national news because he’d refused all appeals and opted for a firing squad. Shortly before the riflemen took aim, the warden asked Gilmore if he had any last words.
“Gary looked up for an extended period,” witness Lawrence Schiller told The Salt Lake City Tribune. “I believe his words [were], ‘Let’s do it.’”
Why would Weiden have recalled a tidbit so obscure when creating a tagline for Nike? For a time, Gilmore had lived in Portland, the city where both Weiden+Kennedy and Nike are based. Norman Mailer had also won a Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song, his novel based on Gilmore’s story.
Wieden, who died in 2022, insisted that his partial adoption of the line had no social or political implications.
“I like[d] the ‘do it’ part,” he said in Doug Pray’s 2009 documentary Art & Copy. “None of us really paid that much attention. We thought, ‘yeah, that’d work.’”