If you have to find a starting point for the fashion consciousness of the post-90s, it is the clover logo of Adidas.
Go back in time ten years. The sweatshirt with the adidas logo on his body and the shell shoes on Superstar are definitely the most beautiful boys in the entire street.
But I don't know when this sports giant became less popular in the minds of young people.
Judging from the recent performance report, Adi is even more in the "water reversal" and is still continuing.
01
It has fallen for 7 consecutive quarters
In the past few days, it is time for the major giants to show their 2022 financial reports.
This financial report is the brand's report card. You say it sells well, you say you are the top in the industry, it's useless. Look at the data to see how popular you are.
Let's start with okay. Adidas' full-year revenue was 22.511 billion euros, a slight increase year-on-year, only 1%.
The bad thing is that operating profit and full-year net profit are plummeting.
The former fell sharply by 66%, while the latter was only about one-fifth of the same period last year.
There are more tragic ones. That is this state of continuous decline, in the brand's third largest battlefield in the world, Greater China, has lasted for 7 consecutive quarters.
●Source: Adidas Weibo
If we say that due to objective factors, sports brands such as Nike, Anta, and Li Ning have all experienced varying degrees of revenue decline in 2022.
Well, there is and only Adi, the decline is more than double digits.
Adidas' popularity probably began in 2015. A shell shoe with a round toe and three striped logos printed on both sides of the upper, becoming the first pair of Adi for many young people.
It is said that after the launch of this Superstar shell shoe, it contributed more than $1 billion in sales to the brand.
Another explosive model that has soared the brand's revenue is the ace Yeezy shoes jointly launched with rapper Kanye.
These two pairs of shoes once made Adidas a hard currency in the shoe circle of friends.
●Source: Adidas Weibo
It's just that the aesthetic preferences of young people are constantly changing. In recent years, in the face of the indiscriminate bombardment of various joint names of brands, the routine of "changing names without changing styles" has been scorned by many shoe friends.
Even, in the social media forum where straight men gathered, some netizens ridiculed: I can't even see Adi's shoes on the wild court.
This sentence, I don't know if it will make Adidas CEO Roside, who is about to leave in 2023, a little embarrassed.
Because, when asked by the media last year whether he was worried about the damage to Adi's brand strength in China, he gave the answer: "Chinese watch the American NBA and European football games on TV, they will always meet Adidas."
Looking back on 2015, Adidas exceeded the KPI of 2.47 billion euros tailored for Greater China.
Also in 2015, Superstar shell shoes beat arch-rival Nike for the first time in a decade to become the best-selling shoe of the year in the United States, driven by basketball players' frequent appearances.
Nowadays, Adidas' memorable hit, in addition to Superstar shell shoes, seems to be only a pair of Yeezy shoes.
02
Adi's excellence
Superstar shell shoes are a classic of Adidas.
The design resembling the "shell head" is Adi's consideration of professional actions such as emergency stop and start that often occur during the exercise of basketball players, and increases the hardness of the toe.
In just a few years, the influence of these Superstar shell shoes spread from the basketball court to fashion, street, skateboarding and more.
It is also this pair of shoes that are popular all over the world, after entering the domestic market, they have been frantically pirated.
Netizens said that Superstar shell shoes belong to Adi, and the shell shoes that can be seen everywhere on the street are not necessarily produced by Adi.
In the face of the flood of "flat" and "counterfeit" shoes, Adi showed another brand new king fried - Yeezy shoes.
●Source: Adidas Weibo
To say that this pair of Yeezy shoes looks very recognizable from the outside. And the explosion of this shoe is inseparable from the hard work of both the designer and the rapper Kanye.
Netizens often use "stepping on" to describe the comfort of a pair of sneakers. This soft and non-collapsed foot feel first came from Adi's proud ace technology - Boost.
I carefully traced the history of the development of Boost's "-feeling" technology.
It was concluded that through an application based on an E-TPU material, functions such as shock absorption and rebound can be perfectly realized.
●Source: Adidas Weibo
It has to be said that the former Adi was extremely artistic and creative - connecting thousands of foaming small particles together to form a popcorn-like Boost particle sole.
Boost, which looks very "crispy", has become the first choice for fans to buy Adi.
This Boost technology also laid a solid product foundation for flagship running shoes such as the later popular Yeezy shoes and "the strongest road running shoes".
●Source: Adidas Weibo
However, in the field of sports brands, the most important thing is the ever-changing high-precision technology.
Some netizens found that Adi's proud Boost technology has not been updated for nearly 10 years. The brand's Ultra Boost running shoes are also often complained about support, midsole rigidity and even weight.
When announcing his departure, Adi CEO Rorsted said frankly: "We made mistakes in China. This sentence caused quite a stir.
Previously, Rorsted had been blaming external factors such as the epidemic and the public opinion environment for the sluggish performance of the brand, and this was the first time he publicly admitted that the brand itself had made mistakes.
As the third largest market for Adidas in the world, Greater China once led the overall growth of adi in the world, but now it has become the lowest one.
03
Crazy discounts for "volume"
Let's not talk about the rise of domestic brands over the years, netizens are more willing to pay for feelings.
Let me ask you, if you spend thousands of oceans to buy a new pair of shoes, and within three months, the price of these shoes has plummeted, will you be super upset?
Adidas is often questioned about the price of the product.
A netizen who likes sports brands said that according to his observations, Adi's regular-priced goods generally do not last more than three months, and they must be discounted.
In the brand's official flagship store, from time to time there are promotions of 1000 minus 500 and 2000 minus 1000, which is equivalent to a five-fold discount in disguise.
●Source: Adidas Weibo
If it is not a very much-needed commodity, "discount" can be regarded as a gospel for the party.
However, behind the crazy discount is the damage to the brand image. It's just that Adi didn't want to, but he had to.
All the while, Adi was stuck with high inventory. There are rumors that Adi's goods have long been piled up in warehouses around the world, and even the door is almost blocked.
Is that really the case?
From 2019 to 2022, Adi's inventory is indeed rising year by year.
A large inventory backlog has led to a lack of cash flow on hand and can only be alleviated by crazy discounts.
●Source: Adidas Weibo
In 2019, Adi's global media director said in an interview: Adi sacrificed brand building by focusing too much on ROI and focusing on short-term efficiency and benefits.
To put it bluntly, there is an excessive focus on performance indicators.
When high-intensity KPIs are not achieved, brands promote at a discount in order to "go volume". In the long run, the result is that increasing income does not necessarily increase profits, but also affects consumers' sensitivity to prices.
It can be imagined that if "discount" becomes the main theme of a brand, it means that under the consumer's discount expectations, regular-priced goods will become more and more difficult to sell.
Or in other words, "if you don't discount, you can't sell", indicating that the attractiveness of Adidas' products to consumers is declining.
04
The brand aura gradually faded
At one time, a pair of clover "Adi shoes" were given many meanings, symbolizing young people's pursuit of trends and the expression of fashion attitudes.
Since 2012, its share in the domestic market has increased year by year, reaching its peak in 2018 and continuing to decline, in response to the change in Adi's market share in China.
We often say that we should be prepared for danger in peacetime. What Adi lacks is a breakthrough in product innovation at Juan. And "lack of innovation" often appears in the evaluation dimension of public opinion on Adi's rise and fall.
It is regrettable that there has not been another eye-catching explosive product for several years, which is full of regret for a sports giant that has conquered users with its product power.
●Source: Adidas Weibo
At Adi's annual shareholders' meeting, some experts bluntly said: creativity, which was originally the most reliable power machine of Adidas, has recently suffered a failure, which can be seen from the small number of product innovations.
There is no more product innovation, or it can be blamed on the overly "cost and profit orientation" in brand development.
Reflected in the market, that is, the product gradually loses its personalization and lags behind the trend frontier. Along with this, the former eye-catching brand halo is dimming.
Once, the most positive evaluation of Adi by netizens was: a pair of basketball shoes will not be broken for 10 years, and domestic shoes will be worn for one or two years at most.
Nowadays, who would want to pay an uncertain high price for a pair of basketball shoes that will last for 10 years?
●Source: Adidas Weibo
More importantly, even if you don't talk about feelings, the quality and design of domestic sports shoes are catching up, and the impact on Adidas is all-round and intense.
The trend of a brand is also a microcosm of the times.
Those who can continue to gain favor are not necessarily those trend leaders, but brands that remain sober and alert at all times and have accurate or even advanced insights into consumer demand.
Times make heroes, but heroes are not always heroes.
When netizens paid real money, but failed to buy the "sincerity" of the hero, how much time was left for Adi?