Essay on Marketing within the Adidas

Marketing within the Adidas ”“ is an activity to ensure the availability of necessary goods and services to the right audience at the right time and right place by the right price with making the necessary communication and measures to stimulate sales. The main activity of the company’s Marketing department is planning and implementation of advertising campaigns. Planning an advertising campaign is a group of advertising managers in conjunction with advertising agencies. In view of the popularity of a brand Adidas, usually it is used almost all channels of distribution, among them are: TV advertisement, radio ads, print ads, transportation ads and online advertising. Moreover, as part of advertisement it often used PR, which includes sponsorship and participation of representatives of Adidas in all sorts of sporting events. For example, Adidas actively promotes a very popular among youth sport game called street ball. As a fact, every year Adidas conducts worldwide campaign and is the sponsor of the street ball championships. These efforts have extremely beneficial effect on the promotion of the Adidas brand among youth. Also, Adidas periodically concludes contracts for the provision of a form of the most famous football teams. As another example can be considered Adidas’ worldwide advertising campaign with the famous footballer David Beckham and no less famous boxer Muhammad Ali, who promote the brand. Their stories were a demonstration of commitment to Adidas for sport, and the story of the extraordinary relationship between the company and athletes, according to Adidas Strategy (2011).

It should be noted that Marketing department in Adidas also relates sales planning, which occurs within 2-3 months prior to the delivery of goods to the new collection through a central office of Adidas. As a fact, sales planning is necessary because the company’s goods are imported from manufacture facilities in China, Indonesia and Vietnam twice a year, and the key shortcomings in the planning of the volume of products can adversely affect profits and, even worse, cause irreparable damage to company’s image. Also, Adidas has a great experience not only in advertising its own products, but also in stimulating the internal working of the resource companies. In Adidas there are reward system of vendors, large corporate events, like an evening in a separate rented a restaurant or club, stimulating employees to increase their own accomplishments, more intensive work in a team, establishing key relationships not only between the representatives of top management, but also in the chain boss-subordinate . It is essential to note that the company estimated that with a large enough, but one-time (not more than once a year) investments, efficiency of the staff increases by 30-40% for the period up to six months, according to Stanley Holmes (2008).

Another Adidas’ practice is a semi-annual sale of last year collection of clothing and accessories. As a rule, sports collections are updated two times: autumn-winter and spring-summer. Goods from the previous collection go under the sale, and starting a discount of 10% + 5% on cards loyalty program, further discount increases. The overall trend in the world market of sports and casual wear is that companies seek to cut costs, and develop new markets as the saturation of local markets due to high competition is close to the maximum, i.e. further challenges of the company will be forwarded to ensure and retain existing customers and compete fiercely for customers of a competitor. The situation is facilitated by the fact that clothes and accessories have a limited lifespan and consumers, anyway, have to replace and update their wardrobe. Also, the basic rate in terms of product promotion at work with a retail consumer is to “work in the field”. That is why Adidas pays great attention to working with their staff, everybody – from the seller to trainee listen special seminars on current and future products and technologies trends. Moreover, twice a year during the testing of all employees of the company is relating to sales, it develops educational seminars, provides information about new technologies and products, which should be transferred to the consumer, according to Steven Chen (2011).

However, the main goal of the Marketing department of Adidas is to develop and launch an advertising campaign of a new product. As a rule, it includes analysis of competitor activity, which consists of: identification of key competitors; cost analysis of each major competitors’ media; conclusions on the situation in the market. As a second step, based on the goals and objectives of the advertising campaign there is an analysis of the target audience: analysis of socio-demographic characteristics of people, who use advertising product (gender, age, education, income group, employment, family situation, the responsibility for purchasing food, etc.); identification the level of knowledge and consumption of the product among the people, who have identified socio-demographic characteristics, and among other people. The third step in this stage is analyzing and making conclusions from existing information. Such survey carried out on a regular basis with the aim to obtain adequate information about new clients and provide fullest services to permanent customers. After marketing actions, managers of advertising agencies and marketing staff summarize the action. For Adidas, the indicator of product marketing is extremely important, and direct method of counting of the number of sold products is a mandatory component of the report, according to Stanley Holmes (2008).

To sum it up, I would like to say that experience shows that in all large and successful companies, marketing is not a set of disparate functions, but complete system of management. Looking at the results of the company Adidas, we can only praise the management personnel of the company, who shows significant results into world market from year to year. As a fact, Marketing department of Adidas has covered virtually the entire spectrum of system linked to marketing activities. The company does not take serious actions without synchronization them with the Marketing department. However, after analyzing the marketing system of Adidas, I would like to submit my own suggestion for its improvement. In my opinion, the company should use following way for further development of marketing system – provide a relative freedom of regional offices. It concerns the development of personal advertisements and not only in the choice of advertising platforms, but also in ways to deliver information to consumers. I am convinced that such step allow the company more tailored to specific of the local markets.

All in all, I would like to say that marketing in general and the Marketing department of the Adidas is not only a major organizational structure with imposing costs, but central body, which communicates not only with customers, but also between other organizational structures that use an extensive database of information of the main party of the economic process of the company – the consumer.