- Nike has added a swoosh to the back of its golf shirts.
- The exact spot is the perfect location to be seen in sports photos.
If you have watched any professional golf this year, you might have noticed a curious new place where Nike's swoosh has been showing up, and it is a piece of long-overdue advertising genius.
As you can see in the photo above of Nike golfer Brooks Koepka, the swoosh on the back of his shirt is off-center to the right.
While there is typically a lot of unused real estate on the back of shirts, this is not the traditional way of displaying a logo from behind. If a company is going to put their mark on the back of a shirt, it is far more common to have it centered just below the neck and collar, as you can see here on Koepka last year (left) and fellow Nike golfer Scottie Scheffler, who reps the Tiger Woods brand and logo.
So, why is the shift to the right so clever? Well, if you read a lot about golf, you also spend a lot of time looking at pictures of the world's top golfers. In my case, I also spend a lot of time writing about golf and looking for photos of the world's top golfers.
When you do those things, you start to see some patterns. For example, the most common action shot of a golfer is the end of the swing. This is one of the only ways to get an action shot of a golfer where you can see their face clearly.
The problem with this for companies like Nike is that while you get a good look at the logo on the cap, the front logo on the shirt is turned away from the camera, and the rear logo is either hidden or partially obscured.
Nothing in this photo indicates that Nike made the shirt Koepka was wearing in 2022.
Now compare that to these pictures of Jason Day (left) and Koepka, taken this year. By shifting the swoosh to the right a few inches, it is suddenly clear as day and now seen in thousands of professional golf photos.
I don't want to give Nike too much credit here. The brand wasn't the first to come up with this idea, but it appears to be the first large golf apparel company to do it on a wide scale.
Interestingly, I first saw this design tactic from the always self-promoting John Daly, who wore his personal logo behind his shoulder as far back as 2019.
I would be remiss if I failed to mention that the off-center logo does have at least one flaw. It is biased against lefties. That logo is still not showing up in their photos.