Adidas and Nike – who’s going to win this one?

What type of business would you say Adidas and Nike were in?

Are they sportswear brands, fashion brands or both?

I think it’s fair to say that they segment their markets pretty well and have both sports and fashion markets under control.

Last year Adidas spent more than 13% of their annual sales on marketing (the industry average is 10%) and they have just announced a “new signing” who is going to cost them a significant amount of money.

Kayne West, the world class sportsman renowned rapper will be the face of Adidas’s new Yeezy range of clothing and footwear.

Now, whilst you’re unlikely to see many top sportsmen wearing the Yeezy clothes and shoes whilst playing sport, Adidas are no doubt expecting to sell plenty of the Yeezy branded products to people who will be buying them for their cool factor (I appreciate that the definition of cool is a subjective matter and I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not you consider Kayne West to be cool…).

The amount that Mr West will receive has been kept confidential but it’s clearly not going to be an insignificant amount. He previously was an ambassador with Nike where according to sneakernews he was offered $4million per year to stay with them but he turned them down.

So, Adidas are using Kayne West to help promote their products to the “people who like Kayne West segment” but there’s another segment that is seeing some change.

The woman’s sportswear segment has to a certain extent been neglected by Adidas and Nike over recent years. Despite Adidas linking up with Stella McCartney (the famous designer and daughter of the Beatles singer Paul McCartney), competing brands such as Sweaty Betty and lululemon have experienced significant growth following their focus on the higher quality end of the ladies sportswear market.

To try to get a bigger share of the ladies sportswear market and to counter the threat that Sweaty Betty and lululemon are creating, Nike has announced a collaboration with Japanese fashion label Sacai (a brand I’m led to believe enjoys cult like status amongst certain fashion aficionados and as the images above from the Sacai Facebook page show, have very fashionable outfits).

Going back to Adidas and Nike, one thing is for sure and that is that both companies have changed beyond recognition from when they were set up.

In the 1920s in Germany, brothers Adolf and Rudolf Dassler set up a shoe making business but soon fell out with each other and went their separate ways.

Adolf (Adi) Dassler kept the original company but renamed it Adidas (named after his first name and part of his surname) whilst Rudolf left and set up the sportswear brand Puma.

Whilst Adidas and Puma were set up by brothers, Nike has an altogether different background.

Nike, was established in 1962 by Phil Knight, who incidentally was an accounting major, and is one of the best companies in the world in terms of getting its marketing just right.

That leads to my final observation and that is the fact that Nike do tend to get their marketing right. Will it necessarily be a bad thing for them that Kayne West has left them and is now with Adidas?