Adidas opens first urban football centre to deepen ties to ‘modern’ players
Adidas is to launch its first urban football centre for what it claims are "modern" players, fuelling a wider reset of its marketing of the sport it hopes will elevate the brand in cities worldwide.
The hub is based in Berlin, Germany and is pitched as a focal point for grassroots football. Working with a group of 35 young footballers from the city, dubbed “Club of 35”, the centre has been shaped around their feedback and the needs of the modern player.
It opens tomorrow (5 June) when Adidas football VIPs and young players will be invited to take part in 2 v 2 tournament ahead of Saturday’s UEFA Champions League final.
Some 100,000 visitors are expected to pass through its doors over its 16-month life span, trying out a multitude of features including a trick shot studio, alley pitch, a warm up area and a boot room. Equivalent to the length of 520 full-sized goals, the 3,500 square meter building embodies the shift Adidas’ football marketing is currently undergoing.
Instead of sticking with the tried and tested approach to football marketing, focusing solely on how the game is played on the pitch, the brand is now looking to the streets for revenues. Street football will play a bigger role in the brand’s marketing moving forward with upcoming initiatives hopeful of capturing the dynamics of a game played by its target audience of young males.
Adidas took the axe to its existing football boot lineup, including fan favourite the Predator model, to spur the shift and build its future footwear range around two play styles; the playmaker and the gamechanger.
"This is a complete football reset for Adidas so we spent years developing and researching the product, as well as involving some of the most brilliant thinkers in the game today in Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho,” Markus Baumann, general manager for football at Adidas. “Cities in general are a key focus for us as a brand and in future our consumers will begin to see a greater emphasis on street football.”
This focus will further crystalise over the summer when the sportswear maker stages over 30 local events in almost every major city around the world in order to give the messaging around its “Be The Difference” campaign a grassroots edge. Creative will continue the edgier and more irreverent tone the brand first demonstrated at the start of the year when it launched its ‘There Will Be Haters’ campaign.
"Change is fundamental to remain the world's leading brand in football,” said Baumann.
“Our audience doesn't stand still, and neither do we. Our marketing around last year's World Cup marked a new direction for the brand, which was followed up by a hugely provocative and emotive look at the world of football with the ‘There Will Be Haters’ campaign. Be The Difference follows that trend of getting the world's attention, through disruptive, engaging and emotive marketing."
The changes to how Adidas promotes football are tied to its wider efforts to focus brand investments on three pillars; speed, cities and open-source. Dubbed “Creating the New”, the strategy elevates the role of the marketing to the tip of its push to kick-start stuttering growth, spanning its relationship with retailers, e-commerce operation and the way it works with athletes and celebrities.
Five years ago Adidas presented an ambitious Route 2015 which targeted sales of €17bn by the end of 2015. While it ultimately failed to hit the target, it gave the brand a footing in emerging markets and increased revenues by more than 40 per cent since 2010.
Its latest quarterly update shows it has a strong platform to kick on from though it is still too early to say whether early parts of its revamped marketing have had any tangible impact. Revenue in its latest quarter rose 17 per cent to €4.08bn, beating analysts’ forecasts.