What do Adidas and Anthropology have in Common?

You should always trust interdisciplinarity. It’s the future, I promise. The future I tell you!

But, mostly, and more seriously, I tend to trust fields that like to mix it up with techniques or theories borrowed by psychology, anthropology and sociology. This trust comes from the belief that the investigative nature of these disciplines, mixed with their scientific methods, improves other fields' chances of success, as well as trust in their actions. From marketing, to UX, to anything you can think of. Ok, physics and maths aside, I suppose.

When talking about sportswear brands, revenue, and marketing, we often think of the eternal struggle between Nike and Adidas. Or, alternatively, we might recall the history of Adidas and the two brothers that found it.

The story of the brothers is simple. Adi Dassler (thus Adidas's brand name) and his older brother Rudolf (Puma) created the two German companies, both situated in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria. They used to work together, but fell out.

That's not why we're here though, is it? We are here to explore how Adidas used the human sciences to gain a competitive advantage.

So let's do just that.

Traditional marketing and consumer research

To acquire the necessary data and information, traditional consumer/market research employs a variety of methods. It is mainly concerned with determining the total market for a product or service. Conducting a customer survey to learn about their preferences and dislikes. Focus groups are used to determine how well customers have responded to a new product.

Nike's brazen marketing strategy is focused on paying top athletes large sums of money to endorse their products (and it works). Puma devotes a larger portion of its revenue to marketing and has expanded into non-sporting casual wear.

The Adidas way

Instead, Adidas employed ex-academics, primarily anthropologists and ethnologists, to conduct in-depth research into client motives. With the help of ReD (a Copenhagen-based consultancy), Adidas taught a group of Adidas design workers fundamental tactics and assigned each of them to spend 24 hours with a client, eating breakfast with them, running and doing yoga with them, and learning what motivated them to exercise.

ReD's researchers spent weeks with both divisions of Bayern Munich's football team.

No, the interviews conducted were not about shoe preference, length, or intuitive stuff like that. They instead asked about what made a team great. What kept a footballer (soccer player for Australians and Americans) at the top of the game in 10 years.

The findings indicated that while many things can be learned in football, speed cannot be taught. Sure, you can exercise, and improve to a certain point, but that's it.

Thus, Adidas interpreted these insights and adapted their running shoes to work as football shoes.

The shoes, which were built with input from anthropologists and designers, were an instant hit when they were debuted in 2010–and they scored by far the most goals in that year's World Cup.

Why is this unusual market research method important? It allows brands to

1. Draw trustworthy conclusions
2. Not go into production and advertisement blind
3. Have the edge: a scientific method based one
4. Utilise diversity, though of disciplines.

To conclude, here is a brief overview of what Anthtopological Marketing is.

Anthropological marketing is viewing your clients as humans immersed in a culture and using this perspective to each stage of the customer experience. To accomplish so, you must incorporate anthropological techniques into your marketing activities and procedures, as well as qualitative research methodologies such as ethnography and the wider culture in which they are rooted. Taking an anthropological marketing strategy, on the other hand, entails understanding the ways in which cultures impact ourselves and our decisions as marketers. Being reflexive in this manner helps us overcome our prejudices, allowing us to constantly refocus on our consumers' lived experiences and, ultimately, be better marketers.

In this sense, anthropological marketing is strongly related to human-centred innovation paradigms such as design thinking.