How Social Media helped Adidas to become a cricket brand

Adidas, one of the leading global sports brands who has never been actively associated with cricket. It had been synonymous with football, athletics, basketball and other sports, but never identified as a dedicated brand for cricket. After it has understood the vast potential of Indian market and the cricket loving Indian youth, it has successfully leveraged social media campaigns on Facebook to position itself as a brand or company very passionate for cricket and cricket lovers.

Business Objectives Of Adidas

The campaign was initiated to position Adidas as a serious cricket brand in India with the following two key objectives,

1. Ensuring long term and sustainable process of interaction with the target audience; and
2. Simultaneously engaging the audience with quality and meaningful applications, events and activities.

Strategy Adopted By Adidas

With the professional consultancy and guidance from Isobar, an agency known for its communications expertise and social media marketing knowhow, the company adopted the following strategies.

• Decided to create a snowball effect to its campaign through a social media platform, where the cricket fans come, discuss, share content and experience.
• The young people in the age group of 14-25 years with a huge affinity towards digital media were targeted.
• It selected Facebook as its primary social media platform because it was the most popular among its target audience.
• It created accounts in YouTube and Twitter to extend the digital touch points and to broaden the overall social media experience of the target audience.
• It started posting relevant content, such as conversations on cricket, games, Trivia and Fantasy Cricket games for long time engagement of its visitors.
• It started posting ‘Sneak previews’ and TVC’s campaigns on the page, prior to their scheduled release on TV channels.
• It used to regularly post photographs related to different events and activities.
• It created an opportunity for 24*7 engagement by many other activities, such as (i) running instant competitions on the discussion board (e.g. ‘Predict and Win’), (ii) hosting a quiz contest (e.g. ‘Rapidfire Contest’), (iii) ‘Spot the ball contest’ and (iv) ‘Immortal Words Contest’.
• It added YouTube and Twitter links on the Facebook page to provide wider social media experience to its audience and opportunity to expand their networking through sharing and participating in different activities.

Results Achieved By Adidas

Adidas Cricket has achieved a phenomenal success in its social media campaign. The following were some major outcomes:

1. The Facebook page has been able to acquire more than 38 Million likes and 41,179 people are talking about the page.
2. More than 916k subscribers to its YouTube videos.
3. Acquired more than 3.8M followers on Twitter.
4. As reported by AC Neilson, Adidas has emerged as the most popularly discussed brand on social media.

Learning

The lead dropout rate on micro sites would be comparatively higher than social media platforms. Social media platforms provide stickiness and so have better magnetic power to attract and hold the audience.