Adidas Company's Analysis: Strenghs and Weaknesses
Adidas is a world renowned company for sports equipment, clothing, shoes and sports accessories. This essay will analyse Adidas’s strengths and weaknesses, its marketing mix, marketing objectives, finance, marketing communications and target market in order to obtain a wider picture of the brand and why it is prosperous.
Strengths of Adidas
Legacy plays an important part in Adidas’s success, as it has established itself as a brand for young active people, who have passion for sports.
Diversified portfolio is another Adidas’s strength. It has a varied portfolio with a range of footwear, clothes, equipment and accessories (Adidas 2016). This helps the company to maximise its profits.
Adidas’s marketing is one of the strongest and most innovative in the industry. Celebrity endorsements, creative advertisements and sponsoring major sports events such as FIFA and Olympics has significantly increased the awareness of Adidas in the market.
Company has also formed strong relationships with International Labour organisation and International Finance Corporation, which has given Adidas a competitive advantage in the sustainability area (MBA School 2016).
Weaknesses of Adidas
Premium price range is one of the Adidas’s weaknesses, as this has made brand’s products available to a limited category of customers, especially in developing countries.
Adidas has a lot of production outsourced to third-party manufacturers to avoid high labour costs and gain access to cheap resources. This may lead to overdependence on outsourcing, hindering supply chain (Moser et al. 2006, 12).
4 Ps: Product
The Adidas group has 4 main subsidiaries: Adidas and Reebok, which are present in clothes and footwear, Rockpot, specialising in outdoor footwear, apparel and accessories, and Taylor-made which is focused on golfing clothes and equipment (Adidas 2016).
The main product of Adidas is footwear. Adidas’s aim is to provide the best footwear to customers which is the combination of technology and design.
4 Ps: Price
Adidas targets the upper middle class customers, who perceive high price as an indicator of good quality, which is why Adidas rarely drops its prices. For its products Adidas uses competitive and skimming pricing, with the former used for ordinary products and the latter applied to newly introduced or uniquely designed products and apparel, where Adidas has more brand equity (Moser et al. 2006, 22).
4 Ps: Place
There are three ways of Adidas products’ distribution, which helps to sell to a wider range of customers: through Adidas outlets, reliable multi-brand showrooms or stores, supplied by distributors, and online fashion stores, including Adidas’s own one. Most sales occur through retail outlets (McDonald and Christopher 2003, 15).
4 Ps: Promotion
Below-the-line marketing prevails in Adidas’s promotion. It is extensively involved in TV advertisements and product placements in games, films and music videos. Celebrity endorsements and sponsorship of major sports’ events and teams around the world is another powerful method (Bhasin 2016).
Marketing Objectives
Adidas aims its products at people, who are challengers and want to achieve higher results, which is why Adidas’s slogan, ads and brand communications are very energetic: “Impossible is nothing”. Moreover, Adidas’s marketing objectives include positioning itself in the upper-class segment of sports’ attire and …
