Strategic Success: Analyzing Adidas and NATS Marketing Strategies - Free Essay Example

Introduction

This paper looks to analyze the marketing and business strategies that have made Adidas and NATS very successful in their respective markets. The idea is to critically look into every single method employed, its effectiveness, advantages, and disadvantages of the applied methods. The paper looks into the common market practices employed by these two companies and how good they are. Other objectives of the paper are to identify how those theories and formulae were applied, the consequences of how they were applied, and if the most effective methods were utilized.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

The Marketing Mix

Marketing can be described as the artistry of astutely combining different aspects of the company to produce a profitable outcome. A marketing manager, therefore, could be regarded as an artist combining different colors and shapes to produce a beautiful picture. This careful combination of shapes and colors can be referred to as the artist's mix. The marketing mix, therefore, is a combination of different aspects of the business carefully combined to reach a profitable outcome for the company. The most common ingredients of this mix are the four P's, i.e. selling the right product at the right price, at the Right place with adequate Promotion (Borden, 1964). By combining these P's in the right way, one may be able to make a Profit. In detail the four P's involve first choosing the right product and how it will be presented; will the Product be branded or not, how will the Product be produced and who is the target audience? Second, after is to price your Product; find the balance between the creation, distribution, and marketing of your

Product and price accordingly. The third is to choose where you will sell your Product according to who your target audience is. Lastly, after deciding on the first three P's you need to decide on how you will promote your product, the last P. Adidas combined all this in their 2012 campaign #TakeTheStage. Choosing their Product (sportswear), Pricing it, placing it at the London Olympics, and promoting it via different avenues both above the line and below the line (Joseph, 2012).

Sponsorship

Sponsorship is the process of a company or a business associating itself with a brand, person, or event (Cornwell, 2005). This is to ideally increase the market share, and sales and to expand into new territories. Sponsorship deals are on the rise every single day (Borden, 1964). The Adidas Company, a sportswear company, formed in 1949 by Adolf Dassler, chose to sponsor the London Olympics 2012 to solidify its place as one of the biggest sportswear brands in the world. By employing different tactics like social media campaigns, and advertising on traditional media like T.V. and radio. A good example is how Adidas used the slogan "Take the stage."

To promote talented individuals across many fields like music, art, and sports. By doing this, the company made itself not only synonymous with the sport but also introduced it as a brand that promotes greatness and striving to be your most talented self. By also focusing on young folks, it increased its sales among 15-24-year-olds (Joseph, 2012).

Above The Line and Below The Line Promotion

Above-the-line promotion is the use of traditional marketing tools that cannot be necessarily manipulated by the company. This means the use of media like television, radio, print media, and billboards. Above-the-line promotion, while expensive can be important when it comes to reaching a wide audience. Using this method is easier because it doesn’t require numerous tailor-made promotional materials. Below-the-line promotion, however, is the use of alternative or non-traditional avenues of promotion. This includes social media campaigns, raffles, and competitions In-store promotions, direct selling, and hosting interactive campaigns with your target audience. It may also include associating your brand with a feeling or lifestyle. The advantages of this method are interacting with customers and potential customers at a more personal level. The company also has more control when it comes to below-the-line promotion. Adidas has employed both tactics numerous times in the past. One good example is the Take the stage campaign.

Take the Stage Adidas Campaign

The Take the Stage campaign by Adidas was a promotional exercise undertaken in the 2012 Olympic Games to increase their market share among young people between the ages of 14-19. The company used TV advertisements to encourage viewers to visit the website where the products were sold. By involving celebrities and sports personalities, Adidas increased brand awareness among 19-24-year-olds by 44% (Joseph, 2012). Adidas also created photo booths across malls in the U.K. where consumers could showcase their talent and in turn, associate the feeling with Adidas. David Beckham, former English National Team Captain, made surprise visits to Team G.B. fans which garnered more than two million views on YouTube (Joseph, 2012). The campaign can be considered to be successful because of the number of brand interactions it generated and the return on investment recorded. In that year, Adidas recorded a 2% market share growth, generated 100 million sales of licensed products, had a 25% increase in Twitter followers and the #TakeTheStage social media campaign had 128 million impressions on Twitter (Joseph, 2012). Given the numbers, it is clear as demonstrated by Adidas’ sponsorship of London 2012, the Great Britain Olympic and Paralympic team, that engaging in the right kind of sponsorship campaign can be very beneficial to your profit margins.

Aims and Vision

The aims and vision of the company consist of an aspirational position a company or business wants to be in a given time frame of an ideal world. This purports to guide the company on where it intends to be as a business or the goals and objectives of the company. Having a clear vision provides company guidelines on the day-to-day operations to long-term operations. They can be profit-oriented, i.e. increasing profits, environmental impact, i.e. reducing CO2 emissions, etc. National Air Traffic Services (NATS), an air traffic and airport management company, has some examples of aims we can study. One of their aims is to be recognized as an industry leader when it comes to the safety of staff and passengers in the airport and to provide innovative solutions to problems facing modern air travel. It also wants to sustain growth continuously and maintain a turnover of 1.5 billion euros by 2015 (NATS, 2018). Aims and vision should also be time-framed, creating a timetable that the business can use to assess and measure the progress of their exercise. One example of a strategy used to fulfill your aims is the SMART objective used by NATS.

The SMART Objective

SMART is an acronym used by the NATS which stands for:

Specific: Having a specified and exact idea of what the company intends to achieve.

Measurable: Being able to measure the progress by setting a level at which the company intends to be within a set timeframe.

Agreed: Involving all the necessary relevant staff in the process of making and setting aims for the company.

Relevant: Ensuring that all steps taken have overall relevance to the intended objective of the company.

Time-framed: Making sure that all the steps are within the planned timetable and in conjunction with the overall outlaid plan.

By using this strategy, NATS ensured all of the objectives laid out when followed in an astute and organized manner. An example is NATS' objective to focus on a more global market and move away from the U.K.-only-based operation. Doing this by following their SMART objective NATS was able to expand to the Middle East and Asia Pacific region, securing forward orders worth 476 million pounds (NATS, 2018). Another huge benefit of having a SMART objective is to allow your business to form long-term strategies that can be meticulously followed and restricted by a timetable. It will allow you to form new goals if the previously agreed-on aims are being fulfilled at the desired rate.

References

Borden, N.H., 1964. The concept of the marketing mix. Journal of advertising research, 4(2), pp.2-7.

Cornwell, T.B., Weeks, C.S. and Roy, D.P., 2005. Sponsorship-linked marketing: Opening the black box. Journal of advertising, 34(2), pp.21-42.

Joseph, S., 2012. Olympic sponsorship lifts Adidas sales [online] Last updated 3rd August 2012 Available at: https://www.marketingweek.com/olympic-sponsorship-lifts-adidas-sales/

NATS, W., 2018. Our purpose [online] Last updated 5th August 2018 available at https://www.nats.aero/about-us/our-purpose/

NATS, W., 2012. NATS financial statements [online] Last updated 3rd May 2020 available at https://www.nats.aero/about-us/company-performance/annual-reports/