Congruity of Brand Personality and Customer Profile as Key Marketing Message
Adidas is a global leader in the sportswear industry. Adidas brand is one of the four Adidas group subsidiaries and its key product is footwear. Though historically Adidas specialized in the production of shoes for professional sportsmen, with the increasing competition from Nike it had to find new ways to differentiate and position its brand in a remarkable way. By analyzing the marketing communication strategy of Adidas one can understand what brand positioning solution the company has come up with. In addition, the current research reveals that in order to increase its market share and maximize its sales in its marketing communication strategy Adidas uses the method of reflecting target customer profile in brand personality.
Nowadays both companies and customers in sportswear industry face the problem of product parity when the market is oversaturated with similar products. In such conditions customers start making their choices not based on their physiological needs but for their emotional and self-expressive benefits (Chandel, Aditi and S. C. Tewari). Previous research proves that the greater the congruence between the product positioning and the consumer’s self-concept, the more likely the purchase of the product (Klipfel, Joseph A. L. et al.). Thus, to win the competition companies need to come up with such brand positioning which will appeal to customers’ values. One way to do it is to reflect the target customer profile in brand personality.
Brand personality aims at reflecting the human characteristics associated with this brand (Park, Seong-Yeon and Eun Mi Lee). After the company has identified its target audience (McDonald, M. & Dunbar, I.), it can create a target customer profile featuring key demographic and psychological features, buying habits and lifestyle (Goyat, Sulekha). It also needs to understand customers’ motivation for doing sports or buying sportswear (Wu, Ji-Tsung Ben et al.). Next, it makes the average image of a target customer the main character of its marketing campaign. Thus, by analyzing the characters in Adidas ads one can picture a profile of the brand’s target customer. Print advertisements placed for the Originals (see App. 1) feature not sportsmen but young and rather artistic men who wear bright colors, unusual hairdos and almost never smile. Their facial expression emphasizes their independence of public judgments, their self-confidence, and creativity. From these advertisements one can understand that one of the target customers of the Originals footwear is a young man, around 25-35 years old, sporty but not a professional sportsman, who wants to underline his individuality and look fashionable but at the same time does not care about people’s opinion. They are likely to live in big cities, have different levels of income and have an active lifestyle. Thus, by depicting the images of potential customers, ordinary people instead of models, in its ads, Adidas creates the brand personality which appeals to the target customers.
From the description of its target customer profile reflected in brand personality, one can understand that in …
