After decades of competitors copying and eroding Adidas’s brand positioning, the company did the impossible with a new strapline believes System1’s Andrew Tindall.
The sports apparel giants have changed their tune. You might not even have noticed. Nike’s ‘Winning Isn’t for Everyone’ and the sharp ‘You Can’t Win. So, Win’ Super Bowl spot set a new tone. On Cloud’s new ‘Move Soft. Win Anyway’ featured a cuddly Elmo, which was straight out of left field. And now it is clear that Adidas is moving on from the 20-year-old ‘Impossible Is Nothing’ tagline in favor of the much softer ‘You Got This’, a campaign focused on defeating one’s doubts.
These are some of the most significant shifts in brand strategy we’ve seen in decades. They’ll cost hundreds of millions, feed countless consultants’ kids, and fly in the face of everything we’ve learned about consistency. But Adidas’s huge change is a masterstroke only the most senior marketers have the chops to pull off.
I worked brand-side at global drinks businesses for six years before becoming an effectiveness researcher. Most of that time was spent trying to grow whisky brands. And looking back, we had a massive problem that’s only gotten worse: most major whisky brands have almost identical global positions.
Johnnie Walker: ‘Keep Walking.’
Jack Daniels: ‘Make It Count.’
Glenfiddich: ‘Where Next?’
Grants: ‘Collective Success.’
It’s progress soup. Kudos to Johnnie Walker for at least picking its positioning 200 years ago. Then everyone else followed has done little to shake off whisky’s dusty image.
Sports brands fell into the same trap.
Just look at Nike’s ‘Just Do It,’ Reebok’s ‘I Am What I Am,’ or Adidas’ ‘Impossible Is Nothing.’ And once you start to notice this progress-obsessed, betterment-focused brand positioning, you see it everywhere in most categories, be it ‘Unleash Your Potential,’ ‘Pushing Limits,’ or ‘Strive for Victory’.
Orlando Wood, in his new course Advertising Principles Explained, compares today’s era to the early 1900s – an obsession with progress fuelled by leaps in innovation. He argues this obsession has made advertising more “left-brained”—focused on logic, efficiency, and repetition. And now, we see it in modern brand positioning too.
I’ve been there too. You came up with the positioning first, and now everyone else has copied you. You’re stuck defending and dramatizing the tiny differences in these different brands’ positions to convince yourself it’s OK.
But brand strategy isn’t about your ego. It’s about serving a customer’s need, building associations they care about and that differentiate you from competitors and the commodity. To create a meaningful difference.
People often quote Porter’s “Strategy is choosing what not to do” but I think this overlooks a key part of brand strategy: consistency and repetition. Brand strategy is about choosing what you’ll do again.
Successful positioning takes billions of dollars and years to build in consumers’ minds. Changing it is painful. My recent research, Compound Creativity with the IPA and System1, shows that consistent brands create huge advantages and generate more brand and business effects.
So, why is Adidas’s shift after 20 years something to cheer on and not utter madness?
I’m terrible at poker. I bleed chips because I’m too stubborn, lazy or up myself to fold after being dealt a losing hand. I also refuse to change strategy despite being on a losing streak.
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Learning to fold and draw a new hand has to be one of the trickiest parts of business. You learn the product life cycle at business school but never how to tell when you’ve reached the “peak,” so it becomes self-fulfilling.
Acknowledging your year-on-year decline, drawing attention to it, and working out new positioning is scary, but it’s the only way. When we were conducting the research Compound Creativity, I was annoyed when some IPA business effects were not aided by consistent campaigning. But it makes sense. For example, being creatively consistent didn’t help brands turn around a decline as much as I hoped it would.
Between 2019 and 2023 Adidas saw market share decline. Despite the vast sunk cost, it folded and drew a new set of cards. That’s why its global marketing team is world-class. They didn't let ego get in the way of the truth.
New entrants like On Running and Lululemon have flooded the sportswear market. Everyone’s chasing Nike and Adidas to own “progress,” and in the process, they’ve successfully eroded a lot of their meaningful difference of “progress”. But don’t just take my word for it.
This will strike fear or joy into some consultants’ hearts, but AI can now create an advanced perceptual map for brands in a few minutes. I had it pick the top brands in the UK sports category, identify the top 15 brand associations, rank all the brands for all 15, and then expertly perform principles component analysis (PCA) to plot and group them. There are some obvious downsides to this, including the fact that you can’t ask where the data has come from or how old it is, and it will often make mistakes or not be able to repeat the exact same results. But there’s plenty of research showing synthetic data for some uses (like this) can be just as good as the real stuff. Now, check out the below…
Adidas. On Running. Lululemon. Under Armor are all in a progressive shirtless mud wrestle, eating each other’s lunch. This is why Adidas had to change and why Nike is pushing further north with its new aggressive campaigning style [reminder: ‘Winning Isn’t for Everyone’ and ‘You Can’t Win. So, Win’.]
A dark art of brand management is moving something on without moving it off. You don’t have to bin your whole hand. OK, that isn’t really how poker works, but the analogy got us this far into the piece. Rather than dumping it, I’ll refine the bits that don’t work. In other words, adapt your positioning for the modern context using the 3Cs: customer, competitor, and company.
Positioning must create meaningful differences. When that difference disappears, it truly takes guts to fold. Adidas folded. And then picked up what I think is a new winning hand. Let’s see how many brands copy it in the next few decades.
