The Depictionist

An exploration of personal and professional storytelling through narrative branding.

“I Wanna Be Like Mike”

Part 1 of a multi-day series in exploring the brand of the modern athlete. 


The myth of Michael Jordan is necessary study material for anyone wanting to understand the evolution of the modern athlete’s brand. And because I want to actually get to the modern, the contemporary athlete’s brand over the next couple days and weeks, I want to start this little journey at the source, the OG; lay some foundation and then climb up to the present. In light of some current events, I do wish I was a few days ahead of the curve. But for our purposes today, this is the right thing to do. 

So. Foundation.

MJ—to the designers reading this blog—was kind of like, “the Apple of the NBA.” Sounds horribly cliché, I know, but there’s something there. Let me explain: before Jordan donned the red, white, and black of the Bulls, there were obviously plenty of great players and great personalities in the sport. But he redefined, elevated, and set the standard for the modern athlete’s brand, all the while making the sport and the individual athlete on a whole more attainable to the common man. 

Likewise, in a very broad and lay sense, Apple has refined a new standard of branding that everyone can enjoy and that everyone can understand. It’s no longer niche or esoteric, it’s accessible. And because of that, quite frankly—because everyone gets it—many people also want to try and replicate it. How often have you heard, “we want to be the Apple of [insert industry name here]” in your design briefs? It works, they get it, they want to copy it. Imitation is one of the unfortunate consequences of success… 

Welcome to the 1990s and early 2000s in the NBA. Everyone wanted to “Be Like Mike” and everyone tried. So what was His Airness’ code of success that everyone—both the players and the sponsors—tried to duplicate? 

 

1. Good looking, charismatic, well-spoken. This is, perhaps unfortunately, a key for an audience base that is primarily white in accepting these heroes who are primarily black—they needed a marketable face, a good smile, and a diction that didn’t sound too unlike their own (read: no gangsta street talk here…). Michael had it all in spades and so the endorsements came flooding in: Nike, Gatorade, McDonalds, Wheaties, Hanes… you name it, they probably wanted Michael to endorse it. It wasn’t like that before Jordan. He paved the way for today’s kids to ink multi-million dollar shoe and energy drink deals before ever stepping foot on the NBA court—it’s just part of the narrative now, a chapter blindly followed, without meaning, in hopes of duplicating his past success.

 

2. They had to be good at basketball (duh…), athletic and exciting, captivating on the court. MJ put on a show every night. Tongue-waggin, high-flying dunks; mid-air acrobatics; buzzer-beating fade-away j’s to win the game… Even his failures were epic. The man was better than Broadway. And he knew that as an act, a performer, a commodity, he had to go out and make sure people got their money’s worth—that they were able to take home their very own spectacular Michael Jordan memory each night. Playing the game well is one thing; playing it to near-performance-perfection night in and night out is quite another. 

 

3. They had to win and they had to win the “right way”—both on the court and off. No ball-hogging, no pouting, no dirty plays; No jail sentences, no drugs, no loose women or illegitimate kids running around in the streets. We want these stars to be someone we look up to as the embodiment of our most ideal self; a self we want to believe is a winner and good person. Michael won in such story-bookish, fantastic, and unbelievable ways that no one could avoid the luster of his shine. That, and he had his act together in the public eye: the nice house, the beautiful wife, and great kids… he was humble, he was charitable, he was everything we hoped we could be… We wanted, also, to “Be Like Mike.”

Seems so simple, right? Just like Apple’s brand seems so simple and so self-evident that near-blatant plagiarism hardly feels offensive anymore. So with such a simple pattern, why didn’t the “Next Jordan” ever come along? There were certainly more than enough who were bestowed the title of Heir Apparent… No one became the “Next Michael Jordan” because, simply, it wasn’t anyone else’s authentic story to become so. The quest almost became a curse that crippled careers. 

Now I know, you could look at it and think: it’s too perfect, it’s too obvious; how could it be authentic to anyone? Well, obvious as it may seem to our generation, Michael Jordan was the first to bring it all together in a way that—as they love to say in politics—both Main Street and Wall Street could get behind. And, being the first to do this, it was authentic and ownable only to him, His Airness, Michael Jordan. Literally, the one and only… 

There are companies all over the place doing great, intuitive, simple, and elegant work. Work that performs so well that the solution just seems to be a given. Well, it’s a given now only because someone thought of it and created it first. And, cliché as it may be now, Michael Jordan was the first to write this particular brand narrative. And the authenticity of that narrative drew us all to him with such incredible magnitude that we’re still feeling the pull more than a decade since he hung up his signature sneakers and walked away. 

  1. hydestyle said: I loved watching him play. I LOVED my Jordans 5’s and 6’s. I know I was a better basketball player. KNOW. However, why why why was he around when the Jazz got to the finals. WHY? 2 years in a row. Jordan, WE just wanted 1. Selfish.
  2. depictionist posted this