A dozen multinationals such as Coca-Cola, Lenovo, McDonald’s, and Samsung have laid out as much as $100 million each to be global sponsors of the Beijing Olympics this summer. An additional 11 — including Volkswagen, Adidas, and Air China — have paid as much as $50 million each for the right to link ads within China to the Games.

Dozens of other companies have less extensive tie-ups, ranging from the ‘official wine supplier’ (Great Wall) to Guangzhou Liby Enterprise Group, which is an official provider of detergent for sheets, shorts, and other laundry.

The problem for sponsors is that plenty of other companies think the Olympics are just as attractive — and are finding unofficial ways to link their brands to the Games.

Nike has endorsement deals with Athens gold medal hurdler Liu Xiang and other Chinese athletes. Part of its campaign is in our illustration.
Sneaker-maker Li Ning (named after its founder, an Olympic gold medalist in gymnastics) runs TV spots featuring gymnasts and basketball players and is sponsoring the U.S. Olympic Ping-Pong team.
PepsiCo got 160 million online votes from mainlanders in a contest ranking mug shots sent in by fans; the winning entries will be printed on cans cheering on Team China. And Pepsi has replaced its traditional blue cans in the mainland with red ones ‘to show our respect to the year of China,’ says Harry Hui, Pepsi’s marketing chief in China.

It works.

Qantas did it to Ansett Airlines in the 2000 Olympics. Ansett died, Qantas went from strength to strength.

Most ambush marketers do what Qantas did and simply deploy images of athletes. Thousands of Chinese polled by research firm Ipsos say they believe Pepsi, Nokia, and Li Ning are linked to the games, though they aren’t. That’s important because roughly three-quarters of Chinese consumers say they would give preference to products they associate with the Olympics, Beijing consultancy R3 reports.

It doesn’t help that the Beijing organizing committee offers five levels of sponsorship, and a total of 49 companies have signed up.
Source: BusinessWeek

From blogs you can get interesting information and new knowledge. On the Huffington Post an interview which had been made for CNBC appears with a link to a clip of the interview. Sadly you have to join to view it. The link is CNBC.

In it the marketing people from Nike and Adidas explain their positions on the Olympics.

Charlie Denson, Nike Brand President said the retail opportunity in China is almost immeasurable. He said, ‘I don’t think anyone has seen anything like what China is today.’

Then comes the conflict. Adidas has paid tens of millions for the podium rights to all of the Chinese Olympic teams. Nike has decided to do deals with 22 of 28 Chinese teams so that they’ll compete in Nike gear — even though they’ll be wearing Adidas on the podium.

To Charlie Denson that seems not to be a big problem in the greater scheme of things. He said, ‘The Olympics are a great point in time and the Beijing Olympics are going to transcend the world of sport. They will become a monumental event throughout the world. It represents an incredible opportunity for us as a brand to participate in the world of sport at the highest level on the biggest stage. It’s a great checkpoint for us but it’s not a destination.’

That last sentence is pure marketing-speak. It doesn’t mean much but it sounds terrific.

Representing, as it were, the opposition, Paul Pi, Adidas vice president of marketing, Greater China said, ‘We have more than 3,500 shops Adidas shops in China today. We had less than 100 stores eight or nine years ago. We’re growing an average of opening two shops per day. That’s a phenomenal number if you compare that to other benchmarks around the world. We’re opening at least 600 locations around the nation and we’ve been doing that for several years. So in 2010, we forecast that we’ll have well over 5,000 Adidas locations in China.’
Source: Huffington Post

Adidas hopes to make hay while the Olympics shine and is looking to more than double the number of its retail outlets on the mainland by 2010 as a result of the Olympic effect.

It has been a bit of a slow start but more than a decade after Adidas sneakers were first introduced at a shopping mall in Beijing, the brand has now become a household name.

The success of Adidas in China coincides with the country’s growing enthusiasm for sports.

Nationwide, there are more than 2,500 Adidas outlets in 300 Chinese cities attract millions of sports fans. Adidas, is the world’s No.2 sporting goods maker after Nike and is expecting the number of its outlets in China to grow to over 5,000 by 2010.

Adidas, which has been the official supplier of the World Cup since 1970, is also committed to the Olympic Movement. The partnership between the Olympics and the company dates back to the 1928 Amsterdam Games.

On January 24, 2005, Adidas signed a deal with the Organizing Committee of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games to became one of 11 official partners of the 2008 Olympics.

The German company is estimated to have paid as much as $100 million in cash and extras such as uniforms to win the Beijing Olympics sponsorship bid. The company will supply approximately 40,000 volunteers, staff and technical officials with sportswear. The illustration is of an Adidas factory in Suzhou which is no doubt going flat out to cope with the expected demand.

Note that in this article Adidas is spelled thus. In fact, it was registered as ‘adidas’ and was one of the first companies with such a damn silly idea regarding capitalization of a name. Since when it has spread like a disease.

Adidas was founded by Adi Dassler in the 1920s in Herzogenaurach, near Nuremberg. His brother, Rudolf Dassler, who worked with him, later formed the other shoe company, Puma and became a bitter rival.
Source: China Daily