Best Marketing Strategy Ever Used – Nike and Adidas

Olympic fever is in the air. The 2021 Olympic Games will begin on Friday, July 23 with the Olympic opening ceremony. That will occur at 7 A.M. EST on Friday while it will occur at 8 P.M. local time in Tokyo.

Let's take a look at a past Olympic rivalry between Nike and Adidas.

When word of the commencement of the London Olympics 2012 got out, within no time the race to become the title sponsor for the event started. Two giants amongst the brands competing for this title were no other than ADIDAS and NIKE. It did not come as a surprise to anywhere when ADIDAS won the auction fair and square. After all, they did bid for $150 million to get the rights for the event.

In the words of Andrew Lloyd Beaver PA “a positive mental attitude means asking how to do something rather than saying it is not possible”. This was the attitude Nike adopted after losing from Adidas at the auction. Nike revamped their marketing strategy ONLY for the Olympics.

The official brand ambassadors were Adidas and that was enough for them to advertise and shine bright at the Olympics. Nike had to come up with something that would grab the attention of the public towards themselves. Even though it seemed impossible, they put in a lot of effort.

Keeping in view Nike’s effort, people were really anxious to know which brand had taken the lead. The apparent answer was going to be Adidas as they were the official sponsors, but surprisingly, Nike outperformed Adidas.

The world was left dumfounded. How was it even possible? What did Nike do to achieve success at this level? After probing, it was seen that Nike made use of a three-fold marketing strategy to stand out and beat Adidas. The question being asked was “What is this strategy?” “How did it do so well?”

(1) According to the Olympics Committee, using words like Summer or London Olympics, London of UK and many more was banned and restricted. They thought that using these words will show association of the brand with the event.

Twitter statistics showed the Nike had more than 16,000 tweets about the Olympics whereas Adidas had only tweeted 9000 times about it. As far as followers were concerned, the number of Nike followers increased by 52,000 and Adidas only had an addition 10,000 followers.

So, what happened? How was that possible? How did Adidas not tweet more about the event while Nike, who was not allowed to use direct words, tweeted so many times?

It was because of innovative thinking and intelligence of the people at Nike. The fact is even if a system is highly complex, people with a keen eye do find loopholes and the people of Nike found out about 3 of them. Nike had followed all the rules of the Olympic Committee. They did not use phrases like London in the UK. They found a way around it. They used London of other places in most of the tweets they did. Other words like London gym, London road etc were used. This made the usage of the word “London” legal.

Statistics show that the proactive thinking of Nike lead almost 37% of the population to believe that they were the official sponsors of the Olympics. On the other hand, only 21% people know that the official sponsors were Adidas. As a result, the sales of Nike increased massively.

(2) Another loophole that Nike found and exploited was the goods the players were wearing. It is true that the rights of providing goods for Olympic was reserved with the brand ambassadors i.e. Adidas; there were no clear instructions for which shoes the participants could wear. It was the choice of the participants. This allowed Nike to go ahead and make 400 participants as their brand ambassadors. They were then given the famous green and yellow Nike Volt shoes. This lead to huge endorsement of the brand.

(3) Nike again took creativity to the next level by thinking out of the box. On one hand, Adidas was featuring participants in their ads, Nike went ahead and made took teenagers in their campaigns. Yes, that is right. No celebrity, no professional, no participants. These were common people, the face of the common man. Nike took teenagers and made them the face of their brand. This inspired people and made them connect with Nike on a personal level. Oh boy! Was that campaign successful or what?

This was the three point strategy that allowed Nike to go ahead and defeat Adidas while they were the clear winners and had the support of the Olympics behind them. Andrew Lloyd Beaver PA said it was a genius strategy that made them win!