Ryan Knudson

You know, younger Chinese, I mean, they don't know much about Michael Jordan.

So, like, for example, I spoke to one person, you know, an employee in Nike in China, a former employee in Nike in China.

He remembers a cousin coming up to him and saying, wait, Michael Jordan, he's dead, right?

And it's like, no, no, no, the legend still lives, is what the guy told him.

So Nike is still rolling out, you know, sort of the old hits, but younger people in China aren't as interested.

Yeah, it's a really great question.

And I suspect folks in Nike are trying to get to the bottom of this one, too.

This is part and parcel with Nike's broader global struggles.

There's this feeling among consumers that they have dropped the ball on innovation, that their products are not as good as their competitors, that they're just not leading the pack anymore.

But then there are these major China-specific issues.

They didn't have too much competition in China for so long.

And so the fact that they were sort of caught sleeping on the innovation front is hitting them even harder in China, where there are these domestic brands who have been innovating, who are cheaper, and who are very popular.

American companies, they have to be prepared to move much faster, embrace digital tactics that maybe don't feel right or don't feel necessary elsewhere, to not think that just because you are huge and seemingly dominant in this market, that that's necessarily going to be the case two years from now.

Nike's peak in China was so high and the company was so successful and so dominant.

It's really hard to imagine ever ascending to those Olympian heights again.

They're working hard on recovering and it's certainly not for me to say that they won't have some success, but it's going to be really tough to get back to where they were.

And that's in part just because of...

They were so smart and so early getting into China, but it's a much more competitive environment right now.

And there's not a single brand I think could really, really attain that same level of dominance over the market that Mickey had.

This interview was filmed at the Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything event in New York.