The History behind Adidas’s
Success
Just three years later, in
1928, Lina Radke, wearing shoes made by the Dassler brothers, won Olympic gold
in the women’s 800m. In 1936, Jesse Owens won four gold medals in Dassler
shoes. By 1938, the company was producing 1,000 pairs of athletic shoes a
day. However, after World War II, the brothers fell out and split
the existing business. Rudolf set up Puma, and Adi launched Adidas. The two
companies reflected the brothers’ interests: Puma adopted a more sales-oriented
business model, and Adidas was more product focused. Until the arrival of Nike in
the 1960s, these two companies dominated the global sports shoe market.
During Adi Dassler’s lifetime,
Adidas continued to expand and develop into new markets and sports. But the
company was always united by Dassler’s belief in “only the best for the athlete”
and his philosophy of industrialized craftsmanship. The latter involved
creating products that were designed to perform for individual athletes but
that could be produced at an industrial scale. Dassler constantly experimented.
For example, in the 1954 soccer World Cup in Switzerland, the West German team
won, against all expectations, wearing lightweight Adidas shoes with new
screw-in studs. At the time, traditional soccer shoes weighed in around 500
grams (or roughly 18 ounces, and about twice that when wet). Dassler observed
that in a 90-minute game, on average, a given player’s foot was in contact with
the ball for just 90 seconds. So he reengineered soccer shoes to be lighter
(only 350 grams, or about 12 ounces) and geared more toward running.
The trefoil logo was created in
August 1971, and first used on Adidas apparel in 1972 for the Olympic Games in
Munich. However, the late 1970s and early 1980s were difficult years for
Adidas. Employees were confused about the company’s direction, innovation had
no focus, design and product quality deteriorated, margins suffered, and
opportunities were missed. Still, Adidas had a hit in 1986 thanks to the street
connection and emotional appeal of the shoes worn by hip-hop group Run-D.M.C.,
whose hit album Raising Hell album featured the single “My Adidas.”
In 1989, with the company at a crossroads, then CEO René Jäggi
invited two ex-Nike managers, Peter Moore and Rob Strasser, to visit Adidas.
Moore remembers that first meeting. They
were taken to a small museum of artifacts at the company’s headquarters. “It
took only about five minutes in the museum before I realized that these people
had a gold mine in their hands, and that they really had no idea what they
had,” Moore says. The former Nike managers saw that the core of the company had
been Adi Dassler’s hands-on approach to innovation — his philosophy of
industrialized craftsmanship, as well as his closeness to athletes and his
intimate understanding of their needs. Moore and Strasser recommended renewing
Dassler’s approach, and developed a new product line called Adidas Equipment.
Moore and Strasser created
branding rules for Equipment, which was launched in 1991 and later evolved into
Adidas Performance, that emphasized product quality. For example, they placed
restrictions on the color, sizing, and placement of the logo, and initially
even on the colors of the shoes themselves. They wanted consumers to focus on
the quality of the shoe, and not be distracted by other features. They wanted
to make the product the hero, just as Dassler would have done. “The model was
to go back to what Dassler had tried to do all his life, which was to make the
best products for the athlete to compete in,” Moore says. Reconnecting in this
way was emotionally uplifting — especially for those who had worked with
Dassler — and helped restore employees’ confidence. Today, Performance
represents the core of the Adidas brand and accounts for more than 75 percent
of its sales.
Although Adidas looks to its
past, it doesn’t live in it. Rather, it uses its capabilities alongside
insights into consumer behavior to create contemporary and innovative products.
The company also extends its way of thinking into its partnerships, encouraging
partners to uncover the essence of the Adidas brand, while pushing them to
challenge it. For example, partners such as Yohji Yamamoto and Stella McCartney
can draw on their premium fashion positioning to open up new audiences and
sales channels while also encouraging Adidas’s own designers to be more
adventurous. As Steve Vincent, a senior vice president of Adidas Future, says,
“That’s the challenge — to do completely disruptive things that no one’s ever
seen or expected, but still feel like they should come from this brand.” Today,
managers, innovators, and designers at Adidas pore over company history, and
determine what to discard and what to keep. They reach back to the lessons of
the past and stretch forward to adapt to the changing needs of athletes and
consumers. The results speak for themselves: Adidas has transformed itself from
a consistent loss maker in the late 1980s and early 1990s to a brand with a
market cap of US$17.1 billion.
http://www.strategy-business.com/The-History-Behind-Adidas-Success-
No comments:
Post a Comment