Nike is the cheeky challenger doing guerrilla ambush marketing

While Nike has encroached on Adidas’s home territory, the German firm has failed to make serious inroads in North America. The U.S. firm extended its lead to take a 15 percent global market share in 2013 compared with 10.8 percent for Adidas, according to Euromonitor. Nike has focused on exploiting social media to target young consumers, while Adidas has relied more on official partnerships with the likes of the FIFA World Cup and the National Basketball Association (NBA).

Nike’s animated film “The Last Game”, featuring soccer stars Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar on a quest to save football from the hands of a villainous mastermind, has become one of Facebook’s most shared posts ever. “Nike is the cheeky challenger doing guerrilla ambush marketing, whereas Adidas follows the more orthodox line,” said Andrew Walsh at sports marketing research group Repucom.