Challenge
adidas, a world leader in sportswear wanted to establish a foothold in the European sports drink category behind innovative product and package technology. The opportunity raised serious challenges because adidas is not known to the consumers in the sport drink category. Such an entry was also expected to face serious competitive pressure in a global market dominated by well-established iconic brands.
Approach
adidas wanted to learn about consumer’s perception of the innovation package and especially to understand the brand implications of moving forward with a strategic partnership to introduce the initiative in Europe and then globally. By collaborating with the strategic partnership team Valen designed and executed a quick turnaround plan to translate the initiative into full concepts and validate the appeal and strength of the proposition in Europe. We used our proprietary Prediction Market model to assess the probability of market success. It works well with new innovations where there may not be good benchmarks to compare or the concept requires more explanation. This is a concept testing approach mixes qualitative and quantitative research which is a tuned predictive method to assess new-to-the-world solutions.
Results
In less than three weeks from project kickoff we confirmed that the initiative has a good potential to perform well with a significantly high probability for consumers to buy the adidas product instead of their usual brand. We also confirmed the absence of any issues related to brand fit by isolating and confirming the integrity of the lead brand equity Points of Difference. adidas leveraged the outcome by moving forward with a broader scope strategic partnership plan which encompassed new platforms to drive growth in completely new categories. The final innovative delivery system is a replaceable sports drink pod and bottle that mixes with water in one system. You can see the product here: Llega adidas Sport Drinks, 4 bebidas de diferentes propiedades y formato en cápsulas (esmtb.com)
