The Essence of Adidas

The past month or so, in my zero period critical thinking class, I have been analyzing the advertisement techniques of the Adidas company with a group.  We've looked at their advertising strategies with print ads and commercials and we feel that we've finally captured the essence of their brand.  Adidas, as many know, is an athletic company that focuses on selling products that will appeal to athletes, for example, the cleats and running shoes that they make.  The question is, how do they get people to buy products specifically from them if other companies like Nike are basically selling the same thing.  The answer would have to be the essence of the brand, the ideas and appeals they incorporate in advertising, and the consequences they attach to the purchase of their products.  In this post, I would like to focus on the appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos, and whether or not Adidas uses them in a balanced matter, or focuses too much on one, and not the others.  In regard to these three appeals, I believe that Adidas puts all it's focus and attention on the appeals of pathos and ethos, and completely seem to forget about logos.  However, in the world of business and advertisement, logos is often forgotten about.  Adidas uses ethos in many ways but I feel like one of the biggest ways that ethos is utilized is in their commercials.  To establish credibility, Adidas puts famous pro athletes and celebrities in their commercials.  Similar to the way that other companies use famous people, Adidas hopes that when their target audience sees the commercial, they will be inspired to go and buy the product that their favorite celebrity is using or wearing.  The inspiration comes from the fact that one of your role models is approving a brand, which causes you to make the mental connection that because they use it, you have to use it as well.  Adidas goes along further with this idea and gives the audience the idea that by buying Adidas products, you can become just as successful or famous.  Adidas also uses the appeal of pathos, or emotion, to make viewers buy their products.  In all of Adidas' ads they give an implicit message, saying that buying Adidas makes you "original" or unique.  This can appeal personally to an individual because of the age group that Adidas focuses on.  Adidas' target audience are people between the ages of fourteen and thirty.  Typically, people that are these ages deal with issues of identity.  They have trouble determining what makes them different from the crowd, and Adidas plays on that internal struggle with their slogan: "Be Original's".  They're telling people that buying things from Adidas will make them stand out and give them the attention and identity they need to be successful.  However, this theory doesn't work the way Adidas says it will.  You may feel original for a short period of time after buying the product, but eventually, so many people have the same thing you do, which makes you, theoretically, unoriginal.