Meet the Man Behind Nike's Neon-Shoe Ambush

You probably don't know Martin Lotti. But if you watched the Olympics, you are definitely familiar with his handiwork.

He's the man behind those shoes -- the beautifully crafted, incandescent kicks that whizzed by on the feet of 400 Olympic athletes, including USA's Ashton Eaton and Trey Hardee, Great Britain's Mo Farah and France's Renaud Lavillenie, enabling Nike to capture the Olympic gold in ambush marketing.

 Mr. Lotti, 37, is Nike's global creative director for the Olympics -- an interesting title, since Nike wasn't an official London 2012 sponsor. An industrial designer by education, he has been at Nike for 15 years, adding the "Olympic" aspect to his title just two years ago, while the brand's preparations for the London games were already underway. His role is to focus on the Nike products that 3,000 Olympic athletes wear on and off the field, from design to deployment.

Painting Nike's Flyknit shoe Volt, as that vivid neon-green-meets-highlighter-yellow color is called, was Mr. Lotti's way to create a kind of "Team Nike." Before London 2012, the brand matched the color of the shoe to the color of the individual athlete's uniforms. It looked pretty, but it blended in. This year, hundreds of athletes across different national federations wore the same color, what Mr. Lotti called "the easiest way" to make a splash.

The result was a wave of attention that could well end up in marketing textbooks for its simplicity and effectiveness. "Nike's move was really clever. They used marketing assets that belonged to them alone, and those assets gave them a pretty unique opportunity to take advantage of the Olympic rules," said Kent Grayson, professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. "The best marketing usually plays with the rules without quite going too far -- striking the right balance between the two is really hard and often risky but Nike got it perfectly this time."

So how did Nike achieve that? It started well before the Olympics, when focus groups of amateur, college and professional athletes were shown different colors of the shoe. "Across the board, everybody loved [the Volt]," said Mr. Lotti.

There's a scientific reason for that. "It's the most-visible color to the human eye," said Mr. Lotti. Even so, Nike left nothing to chance, testing the color against the myriad environments that the shoes would appear in during the games: the red of the track, the blue and white of the fencing stage, and the black and blue of the boxing ring.