UK – Adidas has given amateur football teams in London an unfair advantage through a playful WhatsApp-based campaign.
Its Rent-A-Pred initiative encouraged teams to use the messaging app to find last-minute players. Those messaging the Rent-A-Pred hotline were then delivered a substitute footballer kitted out in the brand’s Predator20 Mutator footwear – among them star footballer Kaka, Match of the Day magazine features editor Lee Stobbs, and Sehrish Mumtaz, brand manager at English Football League.
Building on the brand’s statement that the Predator boots offer teams a ‘100% unfair advantage,' Adidas employed a hype strategy to promote the product and spark novelty interactions with its target audience. By using WhatsApp, the brand positioned itself in line with both the medium and the approach that amateur teams take when setting up their matches.
In this way, Adidas cut through the noise of impersonal marketing, tapping into SMS services as a way to shake up its customer and audience outreach. For future direction in brand service, look out for our new retail macrotrend, to be published in April.