????Few outsiders have visited the third floor of the Jerry Rice Building at Nike's headquarters. Even most Nike employees know little about just what the staffers working here, on the north side of the company's 192-acre campus in Beaverton, Ore., actually do. A sign on the main entrance reads RESTRICTED AREA: WE HEAR YOU KNOCKING, WE CAN'T LET YOU IN, and it's only partly in jest. Inside, clusters of five or six employees huddle in side conference rooms where equations cover whiteboard walls. There are engineers and scientists with pedigrees from MIT and Apple. Leaks are tightly controlled; a public relations man jumps in front of a visitor who gazes at the computer screens for a little too long.
????Once upon a time, the hush-hush plans and special-access security clearance would have been about some cutting-edge sneaker technology: the discovery of a new kind of foam-blown polyurethane, say, or some other breakthrough in cushioning science. But the employees in this lab aren't making shoes or clothes. They're quietly engineering a revolution in marketing.
????This hive is the home of Nike Digital Sport, a new division the company launched in 2010. On one level, it aims to develop devices and technologies that allow users to track their personal statistics in any sport in which they participate. Its best-known product is the Nike+ running sensor, the blockbuster performance-tracking tool developed with Apple (AAPL). Some 5 million runners now log on to Nike (NKE) to check their performance. Last month Digital Sport released its first major follow-up product, a wristband that tracks energy output called the FuelBand.
????But Digital Sport is not just about creating must-have sports gadgets. Getting so close to its consumers' data holds exceptional promise for one of the world's greatest marketers: It means it can follow them, build an online community for them, and forge a tighter relationship with them than ever before. It's part of a bigger, broader effort to shift the bulk of Nike's marketing efforts into the digital realm -- and it marks the biggest change in Beaverton since the creation of just do it, or even since a graphic design student at Portland State University put pen to paper and created the Swoosh.