The football World Cup ended last Sunday turned into a marketing bonfire for Adidas and Puma, as the Italians snatched the trophy with a wildcat on their chests, beating the three-striped French squad in a penalty shoot-out watched by an estimated 1.2 billion TV viewers around the world. Nike was the only leading player left out of the final, as the Netherlands and Brazil both under-performed. The Swoosh made the semi-finals last Wednesday through the Portuguese team, which was beaten by Adidas-clad France, but it didn’t fight it off against Adidas in the final game, like in the previous two World Cups..
Puma immediately reacted with an ad placed in leading European newspapers on yesterday and today, congratulating the Azzurri on their victory. A new uniform with four World Cup stars will become available in Puma concept stores from Monday, July 17. In his usual style, Puma’s chief executive, Jochen Zeitz, refused in an interview to say how many Italian jerseys it has sold, but indicated that they were several hundreds of thousands, representing a best-seller in the company’s history. The Italian team is notoriously well-supported both at home and abroad: when Puma obtained the Italian endorsement back in 2003, it sold about 100,000 units of the Italian blue shirt in England alone that year. The Italian contract was renewed last November to run beyond the 2014 World Cup.
Puma did say in a press release just before the final that its football performance products have recorded exceptional sell-through reports in all markets, recording growth of about 40 percent so far this year. That includes clothing and the innovative v1.06 football boot. However, Zeitz felt that the biggest benefit from this World Cup was a consolidation of its public image as one of the leading sports brands.
While many of the African teams it sponsors were eliminated in the first few matches, the Cat was visible through 56 percent of the tournament, involving 54 hours of action on the pitch in 36 out of the 64 games played. While its sponsored fewer teams, Adidas brought two of them to the semi-finals, and it was more visible than Nike or Puma overall because its Teamgeist was the match ball, because the company’s name was prominently featured on the signage around the pitch as one of FIFA’s sponsors and because its logo was on all the referees’ uniforms.
After Italy’s victory in the finals, Zeitz and several other Puma managers attended a memorable party in Berlin’s trendy Café Moskau where the company set up a temporary office for the duration of the World Cup. Italy was the most high-profile of the twelve teams sponsored by Puma in the competition.
The mood wasn’t quite as euphoric at Adidas on the night of the final, which was spoiled by the French loss and the head-butt of Zinédine Zidane, the Adidas-clad virtuoso. Still, the company easily claimed an overall victory, due to the ubiquitous presence of the Three Stripes throughout the tournament and its previously reported record sales of jerseys and balls. The tally will be further inflated by the astonishing progress of the French team, which led to sales of more than 500,000 France shirts.
The French jerseys were sold out in many retail outlets last week, after France surprisingly beat Spain and Brazil to qualify for the semi-finals – in spite of a special replenishment program that was set up for the occasion. Eight years ago when France won its first World Cup Adidas sold 650,000 French jerseys, but this included a second version of the shirt after the team’s victory, featuring the star awarded to world champions. This time around Adidas France is more soberly closing its World Cup campaign through a series of ads and a dedicated website thanking Zidane for the joy he has brought to French supporters, regardless of his sad exit.
Adidas has also sold 300,000 Argentian shirts. In Germany Adidas sold about 1.5 million jerseys but this score might yet increase with the launch this week of a second T-shirt with the words “Danke Deutschland” - in line with universal acclaim for the cheerful welcome and impeccable organization delivered by the German hosts.
