Adidas Over-Indexes on Team Sports, Running and Training

The bottom line up front

Adidas is the category’s second brand by a clear margin — 11% Mental Market Share, 75% mental penetration, and a Network Size of 7.82 CEPs. That position is earned and real. The mental advantage data tells a more specific story: Adidas over-indexes sharply on performance and sport occasions — team sports, running, and training — and faces a meaningful disadvantage on yoga, athleisure, and fit occasions. That makes Adidas a credible challenger in performance territory and a bystander in the lifestyle floor where the category’s fastest-growing challengers are staking out ground. The strategic question is not how to close the gap on Nike — it’s how to extend Adidas’s occasion footprint before that gap closes from the other direction.

In this briefing, we use the Category Advantage research framework. A few terms you should know:

• Mental Market Share (MMS) measures a brand’s "mental availability"—how often it comes to mind, compared to competitors, when consumers think of buying in a category
• Category Entry Points (CEPs) are the specific needs, motivations, situations, or feelings that trigger a consumer to consider a product category and the brands within it
• Network Size refers to the average number of distinct usage occasions or buying situations that consumers mentally associate with a brand

Where Adidas Stands

Adidas holds a clear second-tier position with real competitive scale. At 11.3% MMS, Adidas is comfortably ahead of Under Armour (9.6%) and meaningfully above every brand below. Its Network Size of 7.82 — second only to Nike’s 10.26 — means Adidas is associated with a genuine breadth of occasions, not just one or two. Mental penetration of 75.2% among brand-aware consumers confirms that most people who know Adidas link it to at least one purchase trigger. The brand’s structural position is durable.

Emotional connection is Adidas’s most underappreciated asset in the segments that matter most. Overall EC sits at 3.92 — second only to Nike (4.55). But among 18–34-year-olds, Adidas reaches 4.37, the closest any brand comes to matching Nike in that cohort. Among high-income households, Adidas’s EC of 4.70 actually exceeds Nike’s 4.36 in the same segment. This emotional warmth is concentrated precisely in the segments with the highest growth and margin potential.

Adidas’s mental advantage pattern is performance-coded — which is both a strength and a constraint. Mental advantage — whether the brand captures more or less than its fair share of a CEP given its size — shows Adidas over-indexing on team sports (+9.2), running (+7.3), and training events (+5.3). It faces a sharp disadvantage on yoga/pilates (-6.8), meaningful under-indexing on athleisure (-4.6), and weakness on fit and flattering options (-3.6). Adidas is competing hard on the occasions where Nike is strongest, and absent from the lifestyle floor where Nike is also underperforming.

The CEPs Adidas Owns — and the Ones It Doesn't

Adidas’s strength is broadest among younger, male, and coastal buyers. The segments below show where the position is most and least durable.

Among younger buyers and high-income households, Adidas is at its competitive best. MMS peaks at 12.5% among 18–34-year-olds, mental penetration reaches 84.4% in that cohort, and EC hits 4.37. Among $100k+ households, MMS of 12.3% and EC of 4.70 — the highest of any brand in that segment including Nike — signal a brand with real premium resonance where it matters most for margin.

Among older buyers and women, the position softens. MMS drops to 10.0% among 65+ buyers and mental penetration falls to 64.8% — a meaningful dip relative to the 75.2% total. Among women, MMS of 9.1% and EC of 3.37 are measurably weaker than the male figures. Both patterns trace back to the same occasion gaps: older and female buyers enter the category through everyday comfort, fit, and yoga triggers, where Adidas under-indexes.

Regionally, the West and South are Adidas’s strongest markets. MMS reaches 12.2% in the West and 11.9% in the South, with mental penetration of 81.2% in the West. The Northeast is the softest market at 10.1% MMS and 66.4% mental penetration — the region where everyday-comfort and lifestyle framing matters most and where Adidas’s performance positioning travels least.

What’s In the Way

The primary friction for Adidas is not awareness — it’s occasion relevance in the segments it most needs to grow. Among women and older buyers, the barriers that suppress conversion are lifestyle-coded: fit, comfort, athleisure. Adidas’s performance-first mental associations don’t activate on these triggers. Purchase intent of 50.7% def+prob among brand-aware consumers is healthy, but the 7.7% definite-will-not is the lowest rejection rate of any major brand in the study — the bigger challenge is indifference among lifestyle buyers, not active resistance.

What to Do About It

Defend the running and sport occasions before ASICS and New Balance close the gap. Adidas’s running (+7.3) and team/sports (+9.2) advantages are real but not unchallenged. ASICS and New Balance each hold meaningful running associations. Reinforcing Adidas’s performance authority through product-level and occasion-specific messaging protects the most defensible part of the footprint.

Convert the high-income emotional lead into occasion breadth. Adidas’s EC of 4.70 among $100k+ buyers is the highest of any brand in that segment. That emotional warmth is not yet translating into lifestyle occasion associations. Occasion-specific messaging for athleisure and everyday wear targeting affluent buyers — who over-index on these triggers — would close the gap where Adidas already has the warmest reception.

Close the gender gap through occasion targeting, not brand repositioning. The mental market share gap between men (13.4%) and women (9.1%) is driven by specific occasions — fit, yoga, athleisure — not by general brand weakness. Women-specific messaging on these triggers, delivered through creator-led channels where women over-index, closes the gap at the occasion level without diluting Adidas’s performance identity.

About this research

Morning Consult conducts over 30,000 daily proprietary surveys in 45 countries covering more than 5,000 brands and 50 economic indicators. 

Our category advantage research is aimed at understanding the needs driving consumers in your category — and how your brand can own more of them. This research is built on validated principles of brand-driven growth and powered by Morning Consult’s industry-leading sampling technology.

Measure the true drivers of brand strength

Capture both mental availability (the likelihood your brand comes to mind when consumers face a need or occasion) and emotional closeness (how strongly consumers connect with your brand), benchmarked against competitors.

Uncover Category Entry Points (CEPs)

Directly tied to mental availability, see the specific needs, occasions, and triggers that drive purchase decisions in your category, and how strongly your brand is linked to them.

Pinpoint growth opportunities

Direct investment toward the moments and consumer segments with the greatest potential to grow your brand.

Turn insights into action fast

Get survey results in 4–5 days through a centralized dashboard and short-form memo that equips stakeholders with clear direction on where and how to win.

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