Adidas Badminton returns - interview and information

Most of us are familiar with Adidas. If not, where have you been???

In brief a number of years ago, Adidas made the foray into the badminton market with quite some fanfare. Unfortunately for us badminton fans and for them, things didn't turn out so well.

Well Adidas have told me they are back. Many of us have noticed a much softer launch of their products this time round. The interview below comes direct from adidas.....

 

adidas Badminton Interview Questions


Q: Why does adidas want to be in the sport of Badminton?

A: adidas is rooted in sport and it is our obsession to help athletes to make a difference in their sports. Badminton appeals to us as it ranks in the top-3 for participation and sport following in almost every Asia market. For example, at the Rio Olympics Games, Badminton matches ranked 7 of the 9 most watched events in China. Badminton also fits with our global strategy in terms of being a sport involving speed and a high female participation rate. We believe if adidas becomes a leading Badminton brand, we strengthen as a brand.

Q: What is the goal and ambition for adidas badminton?

A: To be the best Badminton brand. We define best not necessarily in terms of business size but our desire is to be the brand that is causing buzz in the badminton community, among athletes, teams, coaches. “Best” means that we design, build and sell the best Badminton products in the world with the best service and experience for consumers while being the brand our customers and business partners prefer to do business with. We do aspire to be leading brand in terms of market share in the future.

Q: How does adidas plan to compete and differentiate from the established and dominant badminton brands?

A: We acknowledge there are strong, established, and specialized brands that we will be competing against. While we respect these brands, we do believe that there is a lack of innovation in products and brand promotion. We believe that the adidas brand can help move forward and elevate the sport of Badminton. Our brand positioning is to be the performance brand that fuses performance with style. We believe we can push the envelope for Badminton, just as the adidas brand is doing across several other Sport and Sport lifestyle categories.

Q: What business model and organizational structure are you utilizing?

A: We decided to manage all aspects of our Badminton business: product, distribution, assets, activation in-house. We do this with some slight variation to sports such as Football or Basketball, however. In terms of distribution, we appoint specialty distributors in several key markets. We also utilize our Asia Hub in Hong Kong to be close to key markets in creating our brand communication and go-to-market materials. Lastly to be a complete Badminton brand, we brought on a Hardware and Accessories partner, Marque Makers, also based in Hong Kong to design and develop and bring to market innovative and game-changing badminton hardware products.


Q: What are your priorities for the next 12 months?

A: Two key priorities.

First, to develop our business with our current distribution partners and adidas Subsidiaries and to expand beyond our current distribution reach. We are currently active in China, Hong Kong, Japan, S. Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan and Canada and just setting up in Thailand, India, Indonesia, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand and are in working with potential partners and/or our adidas Subsidiaries in other key markets.

Secondly, we are committed to bringing the best products possible to market. To do this, we need to engage and interact with the Badminton community directly, with athletes, coaches, customers, influencers. We want to hear their input and have them involved in our creation process. We are inviting all our partners to co-create with us.

Q: Who is your target consumer?

We are mainly targeting our products, services and experiences to our male and female “Badminton creators”. Those young athletes are full of creativity, they are courageous, confident and use the sport of Badminton to shape reality and to create something unexpected.

Q: What new products, technologies will you be bringing to the badminton market?

In apparel we have already introduced well-known adidas technologies like climalite, climacool and lately the ultimate climate control through climachill. With our lightweight concept called “adizero” we are constantly pushing the boundaries by reducing the weight of Badminton products enabling the athletes to move with more speed. Consequently we launched the lightest Badminton shoe in class with less than 300 gr. (size UK8,5) in 2015. In 2016 the ultimate footwear cushioning technology (BOOST), which has already revolutionized other sports such as running and Basketball, got introduced to the Badminton community with great success. BOOST is providing the ultimate in energy return, cushioning and comfort.

In badminton hardware, whilst offering a range of products to meet the needs of the aspiring and professional athlete, we are focusing our R&D resources on creating a new level of racket speed, utilizing new manufacturing processes and advanced materials to create noticeable performance enhancement. Our hardware products will be known for being game-changing fast and super stylish, with a look and feel and quality that only the adidas brand can offer.

For the coming years we are planning to leverage the strength of the adidas brand, which is constantly innovating, to launch new designs and technologies to the Badminton industry whilst ensuring we help athletes (creators) to make a difference in their sport. Here we will have a special focus on style and products tailored to the needs of female athletes.

Q: What is your sponsorship and promotion plan? Will you be signing teams, players, or sponsoring events?

We recognize the importance of sports marketing to legitimize adidas as an authentic badminton brand and to validate the performance of our products and the technologies we are bringing to market. We are actively assessing our opportunities and the timing availability to sponsor top-ranked players, we will be active in grass-roots marketing where we want to connect and speak directly to the young, aspiring, passionate badminton player. We see this as our opportunity to bring fresh products, ideas, concepts to the sport of Badminton, and to have to have this badminton demographic play a big part in helping to shape and communicate the adidas Badminton brand.

 

Since adidas covers a range of equipment, this initial post comes under the general forum and then discussions on specific products will go to the respective relevant subforum

 

Perhaps you can be the distributor

 

Going through appointing distributors and looking after quality control etc takes time. They certainly will get there..

I got the message that they want to do this right after the issues last time. And doing it right takes time.

 

But not specialist badminton ones.

 

I temporarily hid this thread at Adidas' request. I have met them again and they wanted to clarify they will be moving forward.

There's still a lot to be done. But you know, last time, the previous guys came in with all guns blazing and spectacularly imploded. The current bosses are being more smart.

 

If there is money be made from it, they would.