Long-term promotional and merchandising strategies for adidas’ young athlete stores internationally and across all channels

The challenge

adidas tasked us with creating an identity to unify young athlete sports under one global direction. This included a system of retail strategies for 23 individual product launches. The goal was to position adidas as the authentic sports brand and choice of kids worldwide. To do this we first needed to understand who the purchase decision-makers were and how to best reach them.

The insight

Young athletes are looking for more than a product, they are looking for an emotional connection. Simultaneously, parents are looking to buy with confidence. Historically, this marketing was product focused and tended to use photography which felt staged and lacked aspirational and realistic energy. We needed to create a strategy which help adidas evolve in manageable steps.

The approach

For the first year we created the 23 separate campaigns as scheduled, infusing as much authentic and engaging sports photography as possible with athletes that were the same age as our consumer. In using this strategy, the following year we were able to reduce the campaign load by more than half, creating more of a focus on emotional sport rather than individual products.