Adidas – Three Stripes, Three Market Segments

Adidas divided its brand into three different market segments during the 1990s, Adidas Originals, Adidas Performance and Style Essentials. This way it was easier to divide the market and position itself in each and target the customers more specifically. Each of those branches has a different positioning, which differ in the type of people who use it, its strengths, memorable characteristics, the price and value it represents (Dibb et al., 2005).

In order to achieve this Adidas uses a differentiated strategy, which has the advantage of targeting more people specifically (Dibb et al., 2005)

Adidas Originals

Adidas Originals is aiming for a retro look between the decades of 1940s to 1980s. It even uses its Trefoil logo which was prior to the famous three stripes.

The Originals series focuses mainly on creativity and passion rather than purely on sports. Most of its clothing lines are streetwear and not necessarily aimed for sporty activities. This is very smart since Adidas is mainly associated with sports and therefore had to somehow cover the market of casual clothing as well.

When it comes to advertising and branding the Original series, Adidas uses mainly creative representatives like Madonna or Pharerell Williams as celebrity endorsement rather than athletes in order to separate it from the image of sporty clothing.

Adidas Performance

Adidas Performance with the typical three stripe logo is what Adidas was from the beginning on, sportswear for athletes. Even though Adidas was divided into three segments in order to cover a bigger market, its main focus is still to maintain and strengthen its status and image as the best sportswear for athletes around the world.

The Performance line tries to cover as many sports as possible from Football, Running, Jiu Jitsu to Kabaddi and to be the number one sportswear in each category.

Compared to the Adidas Originals, the main focus of advertising lies within sponsoring whole teams or representatives of each sport. This is an ongoing race against brands like Nike and Puma, where each brand equips a whole team in order to represent them.

Adidas Style

This branch focuses purely on fashion and works close with fashion designers like Yoji Yamamoto. The Y-3 (Yoji Yamamoto) series is just an example how Adidas collaborates with famous designers in order to create regular streetwear. However when it comes to pricing the Y-3 clothing line is one of Adidas most expensive clothing lines compared to any other Adidas products.

Adidas Style also includes other branches like Adidas Neo, which is new branch that resembles “fresh and hip” clothing which is supposed to target younger market groups.