Battle of the Brands

When you think about sport brands that are not teams, some of the first ones that come to mind are Nike and Adidas! The two biggest competitors in sport clothing-with two very different styles of clothing and brand styles make up more than half of college sponsorship. As an athlete that goes to the University of Louisville, I am definitely team Adidas and I was team Adidas before I came to school as well. While I am biased about which brand I like more, I am going to try my hardest to do a fair evaluation and comparison of the two brands and how they present themselves on social media and which one is more successful. Most people will tell me that Nike is the superior brand, but since about 2015, Adidas has come out to play with the big shots and they are here to stay. Especially in the past year or two I feel like Adidas has come out on top with different initiatives and brand movements. Nike has also stepped up recently by signing more elite athletes, and posting frequently about social issues like the recent Colin Kaepernick movement. After doing a lot of research I have found a lot of statistics and studies on the two brands and their use of social media to market their brand.

Lets start with some basic numbers on followers for the different brands across several platforms. Nike: 85M Instagram followers, 7.7M Twitter followers, 32.6M Facebook likes and 919k YouTube subscribers. Adidas: 23.2M Instagram followers, 3.5M Twitter followers, 35.4M Facebook likes, and 864K YouTube subscribers.

Even though this is from 2016, it is still an important graphic concerning the differences on Facebook

The majority of the data I will be analyzing comes from the latest study by market research firm Gartner L2. The firm took into account factors such as the effectiveness of a label’s email marketing (message open rate, photos, video content), product customization tools, social media engagement and ad impressions on mobile. Based on some of those factors, Nike and Adidas were ranked as genius, gifted, average, challenged or feeble. The study involved 74 other active wear product companies, but for the case of this blog post I will be focusing on their data and conclusion about Nike and Adidas.

Despite being the higher trafficked site of the two brands, researchers say that Nike suffers from “lagging investment” that contributed to its falling from “genius” to “gifted,”. on the other hand, L2 said Nike’s social media pages enjoyed “out sized engagement across platforms” and its Instagram “dwarfs” the next-largest Instagram community’s size 3-to-1. Meanwhile, Adidas’ website boasts “content-rich” pre-release and product-launch pages features video and user-generated content and supports live inventory on product pages and cross-selling at checkout, according to the report. “Adidas exemplifies the potential for achieving growth via direct-to-consumer sales, both online and offline,” the researchers said. the main conclusion of this study stated that Adidas dethroned Nike to top this year’s Active wear US Digital IQ Index as the sole “genius” brand. (https://footwearnews.com/2018/focus/athletic-outdoor/adidas-vs-nike-survey-best-shoes-1202548944/)

Content comparison

After I read this I was of course happy that the research firm put Adidas over Nike, so I did some digging myself. I have never followed Nike on any social media platforms so I decided to follow them for a week to see what other differences or similarities I could find between Nike and Adidas. The main similarity I found between the two was the fact that both brands under all platforms had different accounts under the main page/brand.

For example, there is the main Adidas account, but then there is Adidas women, Adidas running, Adidas basketball, and Adidas Paris. There are so many specific accounts I could not even list them all, and same goes for Nike. This is very smart for both brands having different specialty accounts lets Adidas and Nike fans follow pages based on their interests and location. This way, none of the pages get filled with too many posts, and the content stays fresher. Also, because the main brand is still integrated within the page, it not only draws attention to each of the individual pages, but filters traffic to the main Adidas or Nike page.

A screenshot of the specific Adidas pages mentioned

I could go all day about the noticeable differences between the two brands social media presence, but or the sake of this blog post I will just talk about the main difference I see. The main Adidas account, although it has more followers than the individual accounts, posts a lot less frequently than the others and in the case of the Twitter account, it barely tweets at all. This can be seen in a positive light because by only posting important content on the main account, it keeps content fresher and less watered down. Also, by posting infrequently, it implies to consumers that when the main account does post, it is about something important, which would bring more attention to the post. Overall, it is clear Adidas uses a quality over quantity approach to their social media posts. So I can assume that at this point you have figured out that Nike, is quite the opposite. As I followed Nike’s main twitter account, I found that they’re consistently interacting with their fans as well as answering many questions regarding product releases. They keep their consumers aware on social media really well, always tweeting about certain sneaker releases. Having this great customer service presence on social media, which Nike clearly has, will allow them to create brand loyalty with its consumers. While looking at Adidas tweets, it was hard to find an instance where they responded to a fan/follower and as a result, Nike has around double the followers that Adidas has on both Twitter and Instagram.

Nike's fan engagement on Twitter

My final opinion? As much as I hate to say it, I think Nike might have a slight edge over Adidas when it comes their social media presence. Does this make Nike better than Adidas as a whole? No, not at all. Every active wear company or sport brand in general has their own way of marketing them selves on social media platforms, not one company is the same. Not one company has a perfect social media presence, because that is impossible, you can't please everyone. These two company's have very different values and it shows, but like I said, it does not make one better than the other. At the end of the day, both social media branding techniques are impressive. Both of these labels are making their presence known on social media, combining for over 10 million Twitter followers and 100 million Instagram followers.