Nike and Adidas,
both companies produce almost the identical product lines of sport apparel,
footwear and equipment. How do these two brands which sell comparable products
and offer similar services differentiate themselves? We know that many touch
points are important in influencing how we perceive and experience the brands.
Now, we only focus on the strategies and campaigns of their communication..
First, I will
start with Adidas. Adidas has done the work to find out where their customers hangout online and
engage with them in these places.Then they use the appropriate social platforms to give
their
fans access to the brand, joining
the conversation, connecting with other people and sharing their thoughts and
ideas. Its
main social medias include : Facebook
, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and Pinterest.
Specifically, there are three segmentation
in Adidas Facebook : Adidas, Adidas Originals, Adidas Running.
There are many different ways that Adidas used these social media platform to communicating with fans. For instance, the exclusive first-looks of the
latest Adidas shoes, and the live chats with Adidas’ partner athletes.
In
September, 2012, similar to Nike’s "RiseAbove" campaign during the London
Olympics, Adidas leveraged YouTube, Twitter, and other social media
channels to
launch its latest campaign for his third third
signature shoe, Rose 3.0. It is the video that documented the MVP NBA athlete, Derrick Rose’s
highly personal, six-part story of his rehabilitation from a knee injury to
his return
to the basketball court. Each
part of the story was released exclusively through Adidas’
and Derrick Rose’s social network. And their fans can add a red filter to their profile picture to show their
support for “The Return”. Millions of fans participated in and showed their support. It leaded to over 45,000 mentions
of “The Return” within 30 days.
In this campaign, Derrick is not only the subject
but also the driving force behind the Adidas campaign, helping “The return” to
achieve success with his over 6,000,000 Facebook fans and over 280,000 Twitter
followers by promoting the hashtag and videos on his social network.
However, Nike is
the most connected sportswear brand in the world, without question. As said
Jesse Stollak, chief of the digital department, “Our final goal is to be
connected with the consumers everywhere and to offer them, in the same way, the
possibility of interactions and participations with us”. The Nike’s strategy
clearly appears toward 2 axes:
- To create a sustainable
relationship between Nike and its consumers with social networks and blogs
- To facilitate the fidelity to
the brand
In order to be
available to everyone, Nike has many accounts on all the main social networks.
Unlike Adidas, Nike prefers a hyper segmentation on the social networks with
not only special pages and profiles for each sport but also pages dedicated to
certain countries.
Examples of Nike
pages on Facebook: Nike, Nike Football, Nike Basketball, Nike Football/Türkiye,
Nike Football France, Nike Futbal México, Nike Football Italia, Nike Golf, Nike
Football Spain, Nike Sportswear, Nike Football deutsch, Nike SB, Nike Football
Portugal, Nike Futebol, Nike+ and so on.
The strategy is to
cover all the consumer’s expectations.
In addition, Nike
creates a strong relationship with its consumers offering all the contents that
they wish to have not only on the main social networks as Facebook and Twitter
but also on more visual accounts such as Instagram, Youtube and Pinterest.
Here, you have the
Nike’s infography:
Finally, another
thing we have to take into account is bloggers. Nike is aware about the huge
blogger’s influence. That is why it develops a strong partnership with bloggers
in order to promote the brand and to increase Nike’s visibility. For instance,
we notice the Hins- Healthy Is the New Sexy blog entirely dedicated to women sports.
All these means
generate a lot of fans and communities. But Nike goes one step further…
The major advantage: Nike+
Once again, Nike
is outperforming all of its competitors due to its own community: Nike+. This
community is based on the using of connected objects. Indeed, the simple fact
that you buy the Nike Fuel Band and you connect on the Nike training
application, you become a Nike+ member. The main objective is to share
successes and trainings with other sport friends on the platform.
The Nike+
community is a real success on the sportswear market because it generates
almost 10 000 000 fans. So, the traffic and the activity are really huge.
Nevertheless, even if the Fuel Band campaign was a real success, Nike
has decided to stop it. The reason is not official but it would seem that a
future partnership with Apple has planned in order to develop Nike’s
technologies on the new Apple’s products.
To sum up, Nike has more engaged consumers than Adidas toward communities, social networks and active participation on events such as the Nike running.
Edited by Mengdi Li and Marie-Caroline Lassagne
Sources:
- "Nike vs Adidas on Facebook: Nike wins locally, article by social bakers, in 09/2010
- "Nike se déconnecte du monde des capteurs d'activité", article by Christophe Séfrin, 22/04/2014
- "La stratégie social media de Nike: Just Like it!" blog by Benjamin Tontale, 07/03/2014
No comments:
Post a Comment