Apr 12, 2010
Nike Ad Expenses
Comaparison with Competitors
Note:
KSWS-K-Swiss
CROX-Crocs
DECK-Deckers Outdoor
COH-Coach
AAPL-Apple Inc
HPQ-HP Company
BWS-Brown Shoe Company
Source:www.wikinvest.com
Apr 9, 2010
Ethical principles of customer relationship marketing
Ethical principles of Adidas:
Be trustful: If clients and customers don't trust you, and your business ethics, they will not do business with you or use your product and service. Adidas obviously understand that basic thought that’s why they are very thorough in every processing stage of making the best sneakers for customers and they have been firmly improving their product’s quality as well as durability.
Be fair: customers are treated like an intimate friend as they are also unofficially involved in designing new sneaker models.
Moral psychology: environmental friendly and least harmful
Normative ethics: unique and equality
Examples of ethical problems in business of Adidas
Adidas published some advertisements about Nike’s fake product in purpose to devalue their competitor’s image and enhance their own.
They should not do that because Nike can also have some counter activities to them with the same purpose and their image could be blurred.
One customer reported the problem with his/her sneaker to the Adidas seller and he/she just received back an indifferent attitude of the seller.
A package of Adidas sneaker with an image of a shark, crocodile or python
The package would evoke the idea of using these animals’ skin for some parts of the Adidas sneaker.
Apr 4, 2010
Services marketing
Products of Adidas
Sports sneakers
Men’s shoes; women’s shoes; kid’s shoes
Basketball shoes: TS Supernatural Creator, TS Cut Creator Derrick, Commander Lite Tim Duncan, Clima Madness, etc.
Running shoes: Supernova Glide, Devotion PB, Shikoba MB, Rava Microbounce, etc.
Soccer shoes: Soft ground, hard ground, indoor soccer: Predator, Predito, adiNOVA, Gazelle, Absolado, etc.
Tennis shoes: Barricade 5, Stan Smith, CC Genius Novak, Court Edge,etc.
Training shoes: Vespa S, Nizza, Scorch Sport TR, EnduroBounce, Santigossa, etc.
Arrivals: new-coming shoes
Sale: shoes are on sale
Apparel
Men’s Apparel
Track top and jacket
Long sleeves shirt
Short sleeve shirt
Pants
Shorts
Women’s Apparel
Track top and jacket
Long sleeves top
Short sleeves top
Dresses and skirts
Pants
Short
Swimwear
Accessories
Bags
Belts
Hats
Eyewear
Socks
Watches
Perfume
Other accessories like headband, wristband and earphones
7 criteria of good perceived service quality
Professionalism and skills
Over these years, as a top sportswear manufacture on the world, Adidas has already affirmed their success, and professionalism. Recently, there are approximately 13 000 employees who are well-trained, determined and passionate worldwide.
Attitudes and behaviours
Adidas does not only consider the workers’ skills highly but also takes care of developing customer services. They want to serve their customer best with great and considerably concern. As we can figure out from the Adidas shop’s main website, all the customers’ problems and questions are replied precisely and rapidly.
Accessibility and Flexibility
Nowadays, anyone can easily find Adidas store or Adidas products within their own living area. The chain of the Adidas store is increasing significantly during these years.
Furthermore, the online shopping at Adidas store is also simply accessible for any users.
Reliability and trustworthiness
Adidas is a very well-known brand name on the world so it actually means that people have a trust on Adidas products. With me, I have been using Adidas products for many years and I am satisfied with their product’s quality, models and durability.
Service recovery
Adidas customer service is quite good and they are capable of dealing with any customer’s problems even some unpredictable ones.
Service space
The customers basically feel satisfactory with the Adidas products and services which are evidenced by the fact that the Adidas’s sale is rising annually. Whenever wearing Adidas shoes or clothes, I feel very confident and energetic. With a big marketing budget, the advertising’s activities of Adidas is quite strong and flourish as they successfully gain a sponsorship or advertising contracts with many sports players and organizations and the Adidas ads are everywhere.
Reputation and credibility
It is indisputably argued that Adidas possess magnificent reputation and credibility.
Mar 31, 2010
Loyalty marketing
As we can imagine such a lack of trust can have extremely negative consequences for business. Companies that chose to embrace consumer demand for trust in the marketplace will have a clear competitive advantage over those that don’t. Knowing that importance of possessing customer’s trust, Adidas have been doing their utmost to satisfy their existing loyal customers while not forgetting to approach to new potential customers segments.
The basic principles of the loyal customer marketing of Adidas
Dialogue marketing
Adidas make available their products to the customers. In fact, recently people may see Adidas store or Adidas’s products more often than in the past few years. The Adidas official store chain is now globally and there are other hundreds retailers together.
Furthermore, because the satisfied customers are not always loyal and possibly lured by other competitor’s product, that’s why Adidas endeavour to listen to the customers, catch up with their mood and appreciate their recommendations. The more you can understand your customer, the better you can serve them.
Customer rewards and benefit programs
Besides using the dialogue marketing strategies to enhance and maintain the relationship with the loyal customers, Adidas also have implemented some other benefit programs or special rewards campaigns. Adidas have different kinds of membership cards with 5, 10% discount for any Adidas products. At different business market, Adidas Company has carry out different sales strategies and customer bonds. As Adidas have several advertising deals with famous persons, they also give lucky customer chance to have a short talk with their advertising representatives.
As far as I know, the loyalty marketing Adidas has been using mainly based on relations and sometimes discounts but very limited.
During a whole year, there are some discount-times for the special or ubiquitous occasions like Christmas, Winter break, Spring break, and Summer time. Though the price-off scale is usually around 10 to 20% but with some kinds of product the discount can be up to 40%.
Here is the Adidas gift card for customers to save up their own money when purchasing product at any Adidas store including online shops.




Gift card can be issued for any amount beginning at 15 USD up to 1000 USD.
Besides that, Adidas members and whoever purchases Adidas many times would sometimes receive extraordinary offers, gifts and latest catalogue of Adidas products.

Mar 24, 2010
Customer Database
Nowadays, many companies are increasingly using databases to manage customer relationships to boost both sales and customer satisfaction. A well designed, secured and effective database can help the managers identify key trends and important information such as most profitable customers. A customer database plays a significant role in how companies/sellers keep controlling relationships with customers. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a core part of many small business' overall sales and marketing strategies.
In reality, even the smallest or largest companies spend lots of money annually on advertising to increase the amount of business they have and often they don't always target new customers, but the existing ones they have listed in their database. Keeping contact with customers is a good way to get repeat business and promote new products to the right people.
Obviously, the cheapest way to create the customer database is to make your own. However, it is not highly reliable and inapplicable with large companies.
Currently, Adidas is using the Oracle database software which ensures high quality, availability and performance. The software is: Oracle 13-Terabyte Data Warehouse. Here below are some other Oracle products and services Adidas applies to their customer database system.
Oracle Products & Services:
• Oracle Database
• Oracle Data Warehouse
• Oracle Partitioning
• Oracle Data Guard
Challenges
•• Enable global use of the company’s data warehouse system, which is built on SAP Business
Information Warehouse (BW) and Oracle relational database management system
(RDBMS) technology and contains information related to sales, marketing, and finance
•• Accommodate users at all management levels—from operative reporting to business performance management at the brand level
•• Ensure high availability of the data warehouse system for more than 1,500 users around the globe
•• Achieve worldwide integration of diverse source systems based on disparate technologies
•• Scale solution to manage more than 10 terabytes of data in a single database
Solutions
Ensured high availability and high performance of the data warehouse system as well as a standardized reporting view
•• Enabled global access to the data warehouse system for all lines of business in all geographical regions
•• Created an upstream Oracle Database to consolidate more than 30 non-SAP source systems in advance to ensure data quality and streamline data loading processes
•• Significantly reduced down time by implementing a disaster recovery architecture—with no unplanned downtime to date
•• Ensured high availability of the data warehouse system through replication enabled by
Oracle Data Guard
•• Enabled replication using the back-up system at a distance of 40 kilometres
••Used Oracle tools to improve performance by a factor of 100 for specialized queries
••Utilized Oracle
Some detailed information about customer stored in database:
Personal information
Name: arranged in alphabetical order from A-Z
Address; Nationality: USA, UK, VN, SUOMI, etc
Gender: Male/Female
Email address: easily to contact
Age: different segments such as children group: under 10, teenager group: 11-19, young adult group, and adult group.
Phone numbers: easily to contact
Occupation: sports player, coach, business person, student, worker
Buying behaviour
Purchases: shoes, clothes, sports equipments, perfume
Value: 5, 10 or €50
Amount: 1 pair of shoes or 2 shirts, pants, watches, 3 balls.
Product group purchased: Outdoor footwear, sports footwear, clothing, perfume, accessories.
Place of purchase: Helsinki, London, Espoo, Ho Chi Minh City, New York
Frequency of purchase: first-time customer, twice a week, etc
Life situation
Marital status: single, married
Hobbies: soccer, fishing, horse-racing, hanging out with friends, watching movies, etc
Customer feedback
Complaints, thanks, suggestions
Improvement actions: faster exchange defective product
Satisfaction data: rate of thanks or complaints feedback from the customer
Marketing actions
Regular newsletters: distribute new catalogue or leaflets, press
Campaigns: sponsorship, promotion for new products
Other contacts: via email, online customer store
The main goals of database marketing are to improve customer retention, cross-selling, up-selling and increase the rates of customer acquisition.
Basically, the purchasing information of customer is stored in the customer database of company. The product’s info, product’s purchasing rate, prospects, customer’s info, store’s info are all recorded carefully that would facilitate the process of analyzing the business market for the company.
Based on the figures stored in the database, the company have a general view of the tendency of buying company’s product. For instance, the company will see which product now is most preferable, which product’s amount is downward and since then company will set up some strategies to alter the product’s design, quality and boost the sales and raise the rates of customer acquisition.
For example, these days Tiger Woods, David Beckham or other famous sports players are some ubiquitous names heard many times through media thus customers would have paid their attention much more on them and when they enter the store they would be curious or interested with these sneakers, shirts, caps relevant to those famous players.
Another point is to increase the cross-sell, up-sell: In this matter, when a customer want to buy a basketball sneaker, he/she would also keeps eyes on the basketball headband, basketball kits and a ball so we can arrange these related items together and easy for the customer to buy.
Furthermore, the company notice the sneaker A is bought at high rate so they will design more sneaker A models like A+, A++, etc.
In fact, if the company wants to satisfy customer effectively they would exploit the customer database and make the long-run orientations.
By exploiting the customer’s information and market figures, the company would obtain an obvious overview of the market and catch up with the competitor’s activity then set the product’s price sensitively, develop the product’s quality, renew product’s models and enhance the customer’s care (customer service).
In addition, the company can send a gift or present to their loyal customer on special occasions like birthday, wedding, etc or implement different kinds of giveaways, customer’s benefits. Besides that, the company would set up strategies in effort of developing the customer bonds and maintaining customer relationship.
Mar 11, 2010
Customer Relationship Marketing
Adidas has a good relationship with their customers, they have some kinds of insurance for their products, customers can have their shoes, sneakers or other stuff fixed in couple of months. They also have good customers' service. I have bought some Adidas sneakers at Sello or Stockman and they have kept some information about me, they try to understand my needs, receive my feedbacks. Through getting good relationships with customers, Adidas have been successively renew their designs, get models up to date to meet customers' demand and also compete with other competitors.
Adidas has sponsorship deals with many of the world's top athletes, clubs, and sporting events.
Key principles of customer relationship marketing of Adidas:
Continuously learn about the existing customers: When we know our customers carefully, we can make sound business decisions. Adidas try to collect and analyze information about the customers, and maintain that knowledge as they create customer profiles for the business. They also apply everything they know to building a customer valuation model. Knowing the value of each customer is essential for managing the relationship wisely
Anticipate customer needs: Knowledge of the current customers presents new opportunities for making the right offer to the right person at the right time. Adidas has made many analysis of their customer profiles, especially using powerful analytics tools to provide insight about who buys what from them when. Contact management systems can detect cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.
Good interaction with customers: Creating desirable relationships is not a one-way street; strong relationships result from interaction. The customers appreciate being recognized, listened to, and understood. Adidas has let their customers know that they care about them in every communication.
Effective marketing communication: One of the ways to create value for our customers is to simplify how they deal with our organization. Building the mass communication channels has brought more customers to Adidas stores.
Retain the right customers: Have you ever fired a customer? One of the truisms associated with CRM is that it is cheaper to keep a customer than to find a new one, but this idea can be taken a step further. Adidas has put more efforts in retaining their loyal customers and widen their attention to other potential customers.
Company segments:
Men: Shoes, clothing and sport accessories
Women: Shoes, clothing and sport accessories
Children: Shoes, clothing and sport accessories
Customer relationship creation:
Let’s take men segment as an example to analyze about the procedure to create and maintain customer relationships.
Adidas has men sneakers for all ages from a little boy to an adult with various nice models, designs. The target men customer group that Adidas has been focusing on are athletes and boy teenagers. These two groups have the strong desire for buying Adidas sneakers or other sports accessories and clothing.
Recently, there are over 100 different sneakers designed for soccer player to select and around 120 models for basketball, tennis, running, volleyball. Not only does Adidas manufacture the sneakers for sports athletes, Adidas also sells outdoor shoes models and flip flops for customers. For the outdoor sneakers product line, customers have a chance to select their wish-one within over hundreds of different shoes models and collections such as: Nizza, Superstar, Samba, Stan Smith, Forum, Vespa, etc. Knowing that the teenagers usually consider the self-esteem rather than price, Adidas has been trying to extend the shoes models and apply some more new designs. However, while the economic crisis still hasn’t shown any bright perspective, customers are very thorough in buying any product.
Based on which potential customer’s group is targeted and careful market researches, Adidas set up the balanced price scale so that their products seem to be most affordable compared with other giant sports brands name like Nike or Puma. Along with the appropriate perception of the competition market, Adidas has made some consumer promotions such as premiums, price-off or bonus packs.
Nowadays, no matter wherever you are and any shopping mall you come to, the Adidas products exist in front of your eyes. The Adidas Company has been trying to extend their delivery networks and retailers across all their business markets. The vital brand development and triumphant success of Adidas in efforts of bringing their products closely and easily to customers is now obviously seen which is evidenced by the fact that there are over 400 Adidas officially stores worldwide and hundreds of both big and small retailers.
Besides that, every year Adidas spend a huge amount of money like millions US dollars on marketing communications and customer services. Due to the harsh competition with Nike and Puma, Adidas has been trying to dominate their competitors’ image through having made more ads, commercials, ad video clips and sponsorships.
In February this year, Adidas held an Adidas 8th Annual Europe Camp in Italy for young adults basketball players. At the same time but different location, Adidas celebrated the 2010 NBA All-Star Game by introducing the brand’s lightest basketball shoe with the Team Signature Supernatural and outfitting the 2010 All-Stars with a Texas-inspired NBA All-Star uniform as the Official Outfitter of the NBA.
Customer relationships maintenance:
During several past years of doing business, Adidas has successfully created one of the best well-known sports brands all over the world and is now the largest sportswear manufacturer in Europe. However, while global economic crisis is still being gloomy, Adidas also has to struggle to sustain their business and trying to find brilliant solutions to boost the business’s sales.
According to Forbes statistics, net income for the whole of 2009 fell 62 percent to euro245 million from euro642 million. Revenue in 2009 fell 6 percent to euro10.4 billion from euro10.8 billion. Nevertheless, Adidas expect the better perspective in their business next following years.
Adidas has currently improved their online and offline customer service in order to satisfy even the strictest customer. The customer’s feedback now is highly considered and the time of preparing or exchanging the product is now shortened significantly.
During these years, Adidas is non-stop in extending their successful partnerships with many sports players, sports suppliers, etc.
Not only concentrating on maintaining and enhancing the customer’s relationships but Adidas has also advanced their manufacturing technology and product’s quality. The Adidas Innovation Team (AIT) carries on in the pioneering footsteps of Adi Dassler in an effort to be the most innovative sports brand in the world. AIT consists of a diverse team of experts trained in industrial design, mechanical and electronic engineering, product development and Biomechanics. Using the latest research, material advances and athletic input, AIT spends months and even years developing, testing and refining footwear, apparel and hardware technologies until they are perfectly suited for their intended purpose.
Competitive position:
During many years, the two largest and well-known sportswear manufacturers worldwide Nike and Adidas have competed to each other intensively to achieve the No.1 brand. Until now, though Adidas is dominant within Europe and has no rival, Nike still remains the No. 1 in the world. However, since Herbert Hainer became a Chairman of Adidas Inc, a change seems only a matter of time.
Not only is the name Adidas well-known but Adidas logo with 3 parallel bars simply has also become the symbol of a famous sports brand with the highest standard. The Adidas products are now sold in over 160 countries across the world.
Competitive structure of Adidas is obviously perceived as monopolistic competition. Adidas’s ambition is to become the world largest sport shoes and accessories manufacture all over the world. In order to achieve its business strategic goal, Adidas has found the way to defeat their biggest competitor: Nike.
The competition role of Adidas:
- The market leader
- The innovative leader of marketing
- Have highly valued brands, good image
- Not be obsolete
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