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It’s been a tough week for Adidas.
On Tuesday, the global sportswear giant filed an opposition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to a new trademark application from Black Lives Matter that includes three yellow stripes. Adidas argued that if BLM’s application was granted, it could result in shopper confusion, given the non-profit’s trademark application includes similar clothing and footwear categories.
Black Lives Matter has already been using the three yellow stripes design on its website and on merchandise for awhile, with proceeds going to the nonprofit Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.
Less than 24 hours after its opposition filing, Adidas backtracked in an obvious response to an entirely predictable wave of bad press and negative public reaction. Turns out that when the bulk of your product and image is driven by pop culture—sports, music, art, which is largely driven by Black culture—clumsily petty challenges against antiracism nonprofits is generally an ill-considered strategy.
This latest episode of “The Real Self-Owns of Global Brands” comes in the same week that the brand announced it was ending its Ivy Park partnership with Beyoncé after Adidas suffered a round of bad press in February amid reports of slumping sales and creative conflicts with the star. All of this comes just a few weeks after its 2022 financial results revealed a slump in China and $6 billion of unsold inventory in the wake of Kanye West’s career immolation as a result of his steady stream of antisemitic remarks—which the brand horribly mishandled. The Ye affair led to the company terminating its relationship with the pop star, and Adidas also dumped its CEO last year.
So really, it’s been a tough six months for Adidas.
Ever since that big breakup in October, the Adidas brand has felt somewhat adrift, seemingly unable to recapture the sense of magic and creativity that it had harnessed for the better part of the past decade.
In a note to clients last November, Citi analyst Thomas Chauvet wrote, “A whole Adidas brand reset is probably needed.” Columbia Business School professor and director of retail sales Mark Cohen tells me Adidas’ biggest problem is that it subordinated its underlying brand equity with the Kanye West deal, who became the de facto face of the company. “They’re in a world of hurt,” says Cohen.
The nine-year collaboration on Yeezy generated a lot of value: cultural relevance, hypebeast hype, and billions in revenue. But it ultimately broke the golden rule in sports, which can be applied equally to brands: No one player is bigger than the club.
By going all in on Ye, Adidas went for high risk, high reward—and in the process, in many ways, allowed Yeezy to overshadow those three stripes it gets so litigious about.
If we look at its biggest rival Nike, despite such global stars as LeBron James, Serena Williams, and Ronaldo (and I could have just said LeBron and Serena and you’d know whom I was talking about), the swoosh has invested just as much, and arguably even more, in its own brand equity. “Nike as a brand has never taken second place to its celebrity and sports star spokespeople,” says Cohen. “So whenever something goes wrong—like with Tiger Woods in 2009 or Oscar Pistorius in 2013—they keep going. They’ve managed the balance between short-term versus longer-term value carefully.”
Last summer at Cannes Lions, I talked to McDonald’s global CMO Morgan Flatley about the impact of the tragedy of Travis Scott’s 2021 Astroworld Festival concert, in which 10 audience members were killed and 300 injured by stampeding fans. In 2020, McDonald’s had launched its hugely popular—and lucrative—Famous Orders work with Scott. Flatley said the fact that McDonald’s built the Famous Orders platform with a number of celebrities helped mitigate the impact of the tragedy on the brand. If Scott had been the only celebrity it focused on, she said the disaster would have become synonymous with the brand. But Famous Orders has been done with BTS, Saweetie, Mariah Carey, Cardi B and Offset, and others. “My advice to marketers would be don’t just take this risk once, take risks over and over again,” she said. “Because then, you do open the brand up.”
Right now should be rock bottom for Adidas. On the bright side, well before West, the brand actually did a lot of great work that both impressively spread its celebrity partnership bets across music, art, and sports—and did it in a way that was distinctly different from Nike.
Take its Star Wars collection work for the 2010 World Cup, in which the likes of David Beckham, Snoop Dogg, Daft Punk, and Jay Baruchel are dropped into the Mos Eisley cantina. The result back then was an almost unprecedented cornucopia of pop culture that was both fun and stylish.
The brand also has a past in creatively telling emotionally compelling stories about its star athletes, as it did in a charming 2007 campaign with Beckham and Lionel Messi. The brand used art therapy and animation to tell vulnerable stories about its sports superstars in a genuine, unique way.
Signs of the brand’s creative heartbeat are still evident. One need look no further than last summer when Adidas once again mixed pop culture and sports by partnering with Adult Swim to animate a Rick and Morty 90-second spot to launch the global soccer boot campaign “X Speedportal.”
Or last year’s “Liquid Billboard.” The brand found that 32% of women globally—and 88% in the Middle East—aren’t comfortable swimming in public, resulting in lower numbers participating in aquatic sports. So Adidas built a massive, billboard-size, transparent tank of water elevated above a popular Dubai beach to raise awareness and promote body positivity. It won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix for outdoor advertising.
These are the types of projects that Adidas needs to double down on, instead of finding new rakes to step on like opposing BLM’s trademark application and chasing down anyone and everyone who happens to draw three lines together. Innovation over litigation.
Hey, impossible is nothing, right?
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