CASE STUDY: CRM Helps Adidas Know Its Customers One Shoe Buyer at a Time

Adidas is a leading global maker of athletic shoes, clothing, and accessories, selling 1.2 million pairs of shoes each day. The company is headquartered in Herzogenaurach, Germany, has over 57,000 employees worldwide, and produced net sales of 23.6 billion Euros (U.S. $27 billion) in 2019. It is the second largest sportswear manufacturer in the world after Nike.

Adidas is also a leader in digital and online marketing. The company’s most important store is no longer a physical store—it’s a website. The Adidas website is a key channel for offering connected and personalized customer experiences and lead to increased sales. E-commerce is Adidas’s most profitable point-of-sale channel, with online sales reaching 5.509 billion Euros (U.S. $6.180 billion) in 2019.

When started investing in automation, Adidas launched its first online shopping software. The online shopping system provided a mean for customer to query for products, make orders, and pay online. The software at that time ran on an old version of corporate OS that did not serve the variety of customers’ personal devices. Each sales organization had to operate it’s own servers and software; they also had to work in separate from other relevant departments as finance, warehouses, and shipments. Also, the sales staff did not have a single view of customers’ database; if a customer shops online and would like to come to the shop to exchange his/her items, the sales staff could not retrieve the order number as it wasn’t sold in their shop due to having a separate database in the shop from the online website.

The marketing staff did not know about the returning customers and the system did not provide insight reports on profitable customers neither customer’s preferences. This made marketing and sales planning significantly difficult; resulting in ineffective marketing campaigns without targeting the right customers and understanding their needs and preferences.

Adidas management was determined on not compete on price but on the quality of its brand and the customer experience. Which required a transition from the simple online shopping software to full digital cross-enterprise medium that shapes the way the company keeps up with customers and their changing preferences.

To serve customers better, and to know more about them and manage all its relationships with them, Adidas turned to Salesforce.com, which features cloud-based tools for customer relationship management (CRM) and application development. Salesforce.com helps Adidas identify key customer segments, develop closer ties to customers, and design differentiated experiences tailored to each customer’s needs. Salesforce CRM tools make it possible for Adidas to have a single view of each customer across all the various channels through which that person interacts with the company.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a CRM platform that allows marketers to create and manage marketing relationships and campaigns with customers. The Marketing Cloud incorporates integrated solutions for customer journey management, email, mobile, social media, web personalization, advertising, content creation, content management, and data analysis. Every imaginable customer interaction and engagement is covered. The software includes predictive analytics to help make and improve decisions such as, for example, what channel would be preferable for a given message.

Adidas is now able to deploy its centralized e-commerce website globally by using the Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Commerce Cloud supports every language and currency required for the company’s business throughout the globe. Adidas uses the knowledge of individual customers and their preferences obtained through Commerce Cloud to create different and better products, which can be manufactured and delivered to the customer very rapidly. Adidas is also using the Salesforce DMP data management platform to capture online and web behavior from digital actions across all channels and devices.

To move even closer to the customer, Adidas developed a mobile app that customizes content, interactions, and products based on the customer’s personal preferences and behavior that have been identified via various digital points of engagement. The app features customized product recommendations, color preference and location, order tracking, blog posts, personalized articles, videos, real-time updates concerning an individual’s sport and sports star preferences, and an intelligent online chat tool called Einstein to help answer customer questions and make more customized product recommendations. The app works with Apple Pay and Android Pay mobile payment systems.

Jacqueline Smith-Dubendorfer, Adidas Vice President of Digital Experience Design, believes that using Salesforce for customer relationship management has enhanced the company’s ability to treat each customer as an individual. Who is this person? How much do we know about that individual? Where did that person come from? What is that person interested in? With Salesforce CRM tools, Adidas can now answer these questions much more easily. CRM provides the information for Adidas to adapt what it presents to the customer to deliver as close as it can to what the customer is actually looking for. Adidas can now connect one-to-one with every customer, across multiple channels and on any device.

Analyze the case study: “CRM helps Adidas to know Its Customers One shoe buyer at a time”, and complete the following tasks:
• Identify the management, organization, and technology factors affecting the adoption of the enterprise business solutions, mapping your idea in IS framework by using Lucidchart
• How does the company use enterprise business solutions to achieve its strategic goals?
• What are the lessons learned from the case study?