Adidas to Fight the Branding Game at London Olympics 2012

Adidas Olympics 2012

London Olympics might be an opportunity for Adidas to help improve its market position in the highly competitive British sportswear market. The company currently stands at second position with only 3% less market share compared with Nike which leads with 18% share. Based on its marketing and branding strategy, Adidas is targeting an exponential growth to surpass Nike by 2015.

Adidas wants to be seen everywhere from now throughout the games. The brand is being projected at Heathrow airport at the official London2012 Shop. Not only that, the company is also providing official dressed for volunteers at Olympic Games, outfits for pre-games torch relay and for athletes at the Olympic Village. Adidas is also opening 100 temporary “AdiZones” – areas that will include free-to-use tennis, football or basketball equipment – A knockout for Nike in terms of branding exercise. The company is focused at youth market – they say that “We are one of the brands that is most relevant to the youth market. We like to believe we will be the cool brand of the Games.”

British teams participating in the games will be dressed in Adidas designed clothing. The company has engaged Stella McCartney, a renowned stylist, designer and entrepreneur to create stunning designer clothing for Team-GB. Herbert Hainer, Adidas’s chief executive, described Stella McCartney’s designs as “fantastic” – He hopes that, the company is hoping to achieve sales of £100m from its Olympic clothing lines.

In addition to major super markets such as Tesco and Asada, clothing stores such as Debenhams, Jjbsports and Prodirector Soccor are also featuring Adidas sportswear across the UK. However Adidas is facing a reputational issue on allegations of “sweatshop” conductions for Indonesian workers that are producing outfits for British team and Volunteers.

According to The London Olympics organizing committee’s spokesperson, “We place a high priority on environmental, social and ethical issues when securing goods and services and take these allegations extremely seriously – We have spoken to Adidas and they have assured us that they are investigating these allegations, the conclusions of which will be made public. According to JakartaGlobe, “Adidas Olympic products can sell for up to $80 per piece, but factory owners making apparel for the brand in Indonesia have claimed they cannot afford to pay their workers more than Rp 5,000 (55 cents) per hour.”

On social media, there are several streams of anti Adidas updates but Adidas original twitter account is not on defensives, neither is its Facebook page . The collective followership on these two key social media channels is close to 17 million followers, Adidas is promoting its brand in a unique way by engaging followers in creative stuff such as asking to go creative with company’s logo. Here is the most recent update from its Facebook page:

“These entries already caught our eye in the all Originals Get Creative contest! We’ll be picking lots of winners soon, so if you’ve used the Trefoil for a little creative inspiration upload your entries to win prizes HERE”

This is a wonderful branding strategy of not confronting and putting all energy in building brand equity. Thanks for Social Media for playing a key role in helping Adidas!

Watch this award winning commercial produced by Joe Joiner and Joshua Osborne of Chelsae College of Art and Design