What Adidas Taught Every Business Owner About Positioning at the London Marathon
What Adidas Taught Every Business Owner About Positioning at the London Marathon
I didn't watch the London Marathon but I'm a running geek, so I watched the reviews, analysed the stats and then something struck me. Adidas had just executed the most perfect marketing campaign without a single ad.
Kenya's Sabastian Sawe crossed the finish line in 1 hour, 59 minutes and 30 seconds. The first person in history to run an official marathon in under two hours. Behind him, Yomif Kejelcha finished in 1:59:41. On the women's side, Ethiopia's Tigist Assefa set a new women's world record of 2:15:41.
All three were wearing the same shoe. A shoe that had been unveiled to the public two days earlier. The Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3.
It's Only a Shoe
The Pro Evo 3 was released in a limited drop two days before the race. Adidas put 200 pairs on sale through its app with a retail price of €500. They sold out and the same pairs are currently listed on StockX for an average resale price of €2,627, with some sizes reaching €5,500.
Nobody argued about €500. Nobody asked for a discount. Nobody waited for a sale.
And here is the part I want every business owner to sit with: Adidas spent nothing on advertising. There was no campaign. No media buy. No influencer strategy. Just three runners, a finish line, and a shoe that weighed 97 grams. The first race-legal shoe to go below 100 grams. Lighter than a smartphone.
The product did the talking. And the product had proof.
The Value Proposition
There are hundreds of running shoe brands in the world. Possibly thousands. Walk into any specialist running shop and you will find a wall of options, each with its own technical vocabulary, its own foam compound with a proprietary name, its own carbon plate, its own claim to performance.
Every single one of them will tell you they make great running shoes, but they make you do all the hard work of figuring out if they have the right shoe for you. That claim tells the buyer nothing about why they should choose you over the next brand on the shelf.
Now imagine a brand nobody has heard of asking $500 for a pair of shoes. You would laugh. You would scroll past it. You would wonder what they were thinking.
But Adidas was not asking you to take a leap of faith. They were asking you to pay for something that had just been proven, in the most public way imaginable, to work.
They stayed clear of the generic value prop: "we make great running shoes." The proposition was: our shoe just helped break the two-hour marathon barrier for the first time in history. In an officially sanctioned race. Twice on the same day. Beat that.
The Nike Precedent (and Why Evidence Changes Everything)
In 2017, Nike launched the Vaporfly 4%. The name was the claim: this shoe will make you 4% more efficient than Nike's previous fastest marathon shoe. At the time, that sounded like marketing. A year later, The New York Times analysed race data and found the claim held up. Runners genuinely appeared to perform faster in the Vaporfly, and the average runner started buying them.
Once the evidence was in, the conversation changed. Every major brand in the running category, Adidas, Asics, New Balance, Saucony, Brooks, had to respond. Not with better marketing. With better shoes.
What Adidas did at London 2026 was one-up that moment entirely. Even Nike acknowledged it in a sorta backhanded way by writing: “The clock has been reset. There’s no finish line”. Adidas had a world record, in fact two of them on the same afternoon.
This is what happens when you stop making generic claims and start proving specific ones.
The Lesson for Businesses That Have Nothing to Do With Running
I work with SME owners and commercial leaders who are trying to grow their businesses. The conversation about positioning comes up constantly. And the pattern I see, across construction firms, professional services practices, technology businesses, logistics companies, is almost always the same.
They know they are good at what they do. They believe their product or service is strong. But when it comes to articulating why a buyer should choose them over a competitor, the message collapses into something generic.
"We deliver quality work." "We have 20 years of experience." "We put our clients first."
Let's be honest. These are placeholders that people use when they haven't figured out what they actually stand for, who they specifically serve, and what evidence they have to back up their claims.
The Adidas example strips the problem down to its essentials.
Step one: Know who you are talking to. The Pro Evo 3 is not a shoe for everyone. It is a shoe for elite marathon runners who are trying to shave seconds off a world-class time. If you run 5Ks on Sunday mornings, Adidas is not speaking to you with this product. The targeting is precise. And that precision is what makes the message land.
Step two: Address the specific problem that specific audience has. Elite marathon runners have one primary challenge: running faster. Not comfort. Not durability. Not style. Speed. The Pro Evo 3 improves running economy by 1.6% compared to its predecessor. That 1.6% is the difference between above and below two hours. Adidas knows this and their messaging is laser-focused about it.
Step three: Prove it. This is the part most businesses skip. They make the claim, but they stop short of the evidence. World record times are unusually dramatic proof, but the principle holds at every scale. Case studies. Audit data. Named clients. Specific outcomes. Real numbers. Without proof, your positioning is just another voice in the noise.
When those three things are in place, price stops being the issue.
I am a runner who buys his shoes in the sales cause I'm a cheapskate. Quality matters to me but price will always win. I know I am not the target audience for the Pro Evo 3. A 1.6% improvement in my economy is not going to put me near a podium. Adidas knows this. They are not talking to me with this product.
But if I were a serious competitive athlete with a qualifying standard in sight, I would not hesitate. I would probably buy two pairs without giving the price a second thought. Because the proof is there, and the price reflects the proof.
Why Most Businesses Get Positioning Wrong
The mistake I see most often is that businesses write their positioning for themselves, not for their buyers.
They lead with what they do, not with the problem they solve. They describe their process, not their outcomes. They talk about their years of experience, not about what that experience means for the person sitting across the table.
In an audit I ran across a cohort of Irish SMEs in the construction sector, the vast majority could not articulate why a buyer should choose them over a competitor. The firms that did stand out were not bigger or older or better resourced. They simply led with the customer's problem before their own credentials.
Adidas did not launch the Pro Evo 3 by talking about their innovation team in Herzogenaurach. They did not lead with the Lightstrike Pro Evo foam compound or the Energyrim carbon frame. They let Sabastian Sawe cross the finish line at 1:59:30 and let the world do the rest.
The product was the proof. The proof was the positioning.
Three Questions Worth Answering About Positioning
If you are a business owner reading this, I want to leave you with three questions that get to the core of positioning.
Who, specifically, are you talking to? Not "SMEs" or "construction companies" or "professional services firms." Who is the person sitting across the table? What is their role? What problem keeps them awake? What does success look like for them in six months?
What specific outcome do you deliver for that specific person? Not quality, not experience, not dedication. A tangible, describable result. Something they can measure or observe.
What evidence do you have? Even if you have been in business for only a few months and only have a couple of customers, you have real data, real outcomes. You can use it to back up your claims
If you can answer all three clearly, you have the foundation of a positioning statement. If you cannot, that is the gap. And it is the most expensive gap in your business, even if it does not appear anywhere on your P&L.
A Final Thought
The morning after the London Marathon, Adidas collected Sawe's shoes from his feet at the finish line, wrote his time on the side, and sent them to the company archives in Germany.
They did not need to say anything else.
That is what good positioning feels like. You do not need to persuade anyone of anything. The evidence speaks clearly enough that buyers persuade themselves.
The question is whether your business has built that kind of evidence yet. And if it has, whether you are communicating it in a way that the right people can hear.
About This Post
Octavio is a marketing consultant and coach working with SME founders and commercial leaders on positioning, B2B lead generation, and marketing strategy. The construction sector audit referenced in this post covered 28 Irish SMEs and was conducted in early 2026 using publicly available website and digital content. All marathon statistics are drawn from official race results and verified press coverage from the 2026 London Marathon.
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