I find this bit of control freakery coming out of the IOC (and, apparently, the ATP and WTA are going along, bleating every step of the way!) simply astounding.
Adidas has worked long and hard to make the three-stripe logo a kind of transcendent symbol of athletic performance. They've done a wonderful job of that, without being crass or overly commercial about it.
The three-stripe design is elegant, unobtrusive, and artful. It has survived the test of time beautifully, meaning it's timeless. And like blue jeans, three-stripe Adidas has absolutely transcended class, race and gender. There’s nothing elitist about the three stripes (by contrast, think Ralph Lauren), nor anything self-consciously and pathetically downmarket (think of your local indie filmmaker, with his soul patch and baggy jeans, babbling about some MTV video he just made: “Man, like, it’s so edgy, so . . . street.”)
The three-stripe story is a simple—and rare—one of success meticulously built over decades, utterly earned and well deserved. I'm not even sure I ever saw a television ad for Adidas three-stripe products until two or three years ago, much less remember Adidas unloading the kind of benumbing ad bombardment Nike lauches every 34 minutes or so.
Of course, now the competition is whining and protesting, because their own lame logos and cheesy, desperate-to-please-everyone strategies don’t have enough boost to swoosh them into the rarefied air occupied by Adidas.
Think I'm overstating Adidas preeminence? Just look at how the system has worked in tennis. Adidas historically has found, supported, and signed the most interesting and appealing players on the planet—going all the way back to Ilie Nastase and continuing through Anna Kournikova and Steffi Graf, and Marcelo Rios and Marat Safin.
Often, some other company would then see what a good call Adidas made and, as the player became a star, move in to lure the player away with barrels of cash. Adidas would just shrug, and move on and find another gem among the youngsters and launch the process all over.
The Nike-Adidas comparison is a paricularly interesting one. It seems to me that Nike is IBM, Adidas is Apple; Nike is studio movies, Adidas is indie films; Nike is a luxury sedan, Adidas a sporty convertible. You can’t say Nike without thinking “branding” or “marketing." Say Adidas and you think "sports" or "three stripes."
Of course, we’re not talking sinner vs. saint here. Both Nike and Adidas are corporate entities with the same goal, seeking profits. They just go about it differently. I guess if you wanted to argue it from the opposite perspective you could say that Adidas is stealthier than those ham-fisted Nike folks with their self-consciously hip ad campaigns, and therefore more insidious.
But I don’t think it’s that important. It’s just sports and marketing, after all. Both companies charge way too much for their products anyway.
But banning the three stripes is a silly move that punishes the company that has gone about meeting its commerical aims admirably, without becoming a symbol of commercialization of sports. If anything, Adidas is the role model in sports marketing.
No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.