Niche-down to Scale-up
Adidas Originals launched Originals Sport in China with three short films built on a fictional "Trefoil Sports School," and 20 community classes across seven cities.
The classes range across a wide array of sports and hobbies, including... Outdoor table tennis. Vintage-inspired tennis. Tea-themed barre. Graffiti roundnet.
It's not one activation repeated twenty times. It's multiple niche cohorts, each with its own core audience.
There used to be a time when brands like Adidas and Nike could own market share for entire categories... top-down, with little risk of leakage.
Brands no longer own tier one categories, not even brands the size of Adidas.
• Categories fragment faster than campaigns can cover them<br>• Attention bought at the top of the funnel is rented<br>• Niche operators and DTC specialists micro-target sub-categories
For brands willing to dive deep into communities, categories can still be retained and built. That is what Adidas appears to be doing with this activation... identifying the niches, laying the groundwork for cultural credibility.
Our research keeps landing in the same place... brands that sit inside core communities hold volume without giving up ASP. Cohort ownership is a pricing position, not only a marketing one.
So the play is niching down to scale up.
Anchor where you can genuinely belong, then move into what sits adjacent. Barre borders studio fitness. Roundnet borders street sport. Get the anchor right and expansion becomes pull rather than push.
Adidas has the scale to run twenty of these conversations at once. That is a real advantage... if the classes are still running after the campaign cycle moves on.
Keep them, and it stops renting audiences and starts building equity. That is winning with culture.