The goal was to propose pioneering women's footwear, apparel and accessories across the sports and lifestyle category, in order to enable women to convey their uniqueness.
With both stylish and useful products, emotional promotion concepts and partnerships with the best athletes (e.g. Amelie Mauresmo, Carolina Kluft, Nicole Vaidisova) and other celebrities (e.g. Scarlett Johansson), the corporation showed that Reebok was a product that fully understood the requirements of the female customer. But such niche segments ignored the male and children's market section, incurring a large amount of lost opportunity in these segments. For this reason, Adidas took steps to diversify the market positioning of the company (Annual Report 2006: Adidas, 2006).
And this was a necessary step that Reebok could not quite accomplish by itself. According to Terry Lefton (2009), the Reebok brand struggled with direction at the time of acquisition. Indeed, while it catered mostly to women, the company recognized the need to cater to the rest of the market in order to be able to compete with recognized giants such as Nike. With the latter also being a rival of Adidas, the merger made sense from the Reebok point-of-view.
Once again, a better sense of focus and leadership was required in order to bring more focus to the Reebok brand. The merger appears to be an attempt to remedy a deeper-lying problem rather than being a truly mutually beneficial deal for both parties involved.
3. A lack of proper direction/leadership in the company after the death of Mr. Adi Dassler: Mr. Dassler has been a very good leader and the pivot of the company. In his life the company was able to obtain 700 patents. He had very good leadership skills to make the company grow. But on the death of Mr. Dassler, the company itself was parallelized. Because of the lack of leadership and direction, they descended to the 8th position in an industry that was in fact created by Adi Dassler itself. Recent revolutionary change and restructuring in the company are the only solution to handle this problem.
The poor leadership issue is substantiated...
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