Marketing and all things related

We enjoyed the Olympic Winter Games in Torino, and blogged on several Olympic topics. True, the US athletes acted childish, but their antics gave us something else to think about other than our problems for awhile. And while we are not holding our breath, we are looking forward to the upcoming 2008 Games in Beijing. We are curious to see if the Chinese will run the event like Disney World (only more efficient.) And while we are waiting, we can watch advertisers jockey for position. For example, Adidas is running hard to overtake Nike at the most popular running shoe in time for the games. Adidas is opening an average 1.5 new outlets a day in China over the next two years as part of a plan to double its current 2,500 Adidas-brand stores in the country by 2010. Nike, on the other hand, is already the official apparel sponsor for the Chinese basketball team, an event where the Chinese are expected to medal. Marketing Blurb is not going to handicap this Adidas versus Nike race. We do expect, however, that Chinese athletes will be better behaved than their US counterparts. We learned about this from The Wall Street Journal.