The branding competition has been claimed by Adidas after their boots scored more goals in the South Africa World Cup than any other brand. Players sporting the new Adidas F50 Adizero scored a total 41 goals during the competition.
An Adidas spokesperson remarked that 2010 has been their most successful campaign but as of yet the company have released no figures. Australian marketing director Simon Millar noted that it would be foolish to measure sales just yet as “most people buy their footy boots at the start of the season”.
Bitterly competing with Nike, the sports giant splashed more than 400 million US dollars on the campaign which included designing and producing the controversial Jubilani ball. However Nike stole much of the attention at the last minute with their ‘write the future’ campaign which was viewed more than 15 million times on YouTube alone.
Adidas spent an estimated 120 million US dollars on sponsoring the world cup, something which it has done since 1970. According to market researchers Sport+Markt, Adidas had the greatest visibility in terms of teams and players.
However Adidas’ success was not without its pitfalls; the Jubilani match ball caused much controversy as many of the loosing teams claimed that in being too aerodynamic it became too hard to control. Teams who chose to train with the ball when it was launched had no complaints during the world cup and winners Spain had never touched one until the first game.
Nike took a different route and sponsored individual players; unfortunately their plan had major flaws. Their ‘write the future’ ad was undoubtedly the most successful viral campaign but there was one thing Nike couldn’t control; one by one the star players featured in the ads fell victim to what became known as the ‘Nike curse’ and their teams were knocked out of the competition, a complete branding disaster. It seems in choosing to endorse some of the world’s biggest premiership players Nike had neglected to consider the most successful teams and thus lost the branding race.
Sales for Adidas Football Boots have taken a huge rise since the competition. We are likely to see many more of the boots along with things like an Arsenal Football shirt.