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Nike's logo was designed by a graphic design student.

In these cases, I think its less about the cost of the initial design but the hundreds of billions of dollars in marketing and advertising spent since building the value of the mark in our collective conscience.

I completely agree. I was just making the point that it isn't necessary to spend a lot of money on a logo when bootstrapping. I've had logos created by designers on Elance for around the same cost and been very pleased with the results.

Nike logo was designed in 1975, this is ~ $155 considering inflation. It was cheap but non that cheap.