Bob Sheard: It's very important that brands understand the diffusion of influence and the diffusion of innovation, because this drives positioning in the marketplace, it drives distribution strategy, it drives influencer strategy. What happens is we need to understand that when we launch a product or a brand, it's going to diffuse through the marketplace. So it's going to start, ideally, it would start with opinion leaders. Opinion leaders would first see a brand and they would adopt it. They would be buying the brand at the start of its product life cycle, so when it's at its most exclusive, when it's at its most scarce, when it's at its most expensive, when it's at its least volume, and they would start to wear it. So an example of that would be in the mid-90s, when an opinion leader would be a pop star or a journalist. An opinion leader, therefore, might be Jamiroquai, and he started his career, but he was wearing Adidas Gazelles whilst doing that, and so we saw him on TV, we saw him featured in magazines like the Face and ID wearing Gazelles. So he's an opinion leader. It then diffused from people like him because also bands like The Farm, it diffused from them into journalists, stylists, fashion buyers and they really represent the early adopter. So they've seen it emerge. They then adopt it and if you're a journalist, you start to write about it. If you're a fashion buyer, you start to place it in your stores and so therefore you start to expand its volume. The price comes down a little bit, it starts to get more awareness, so eventually the early mass markets start to see it. So that would be in the case of Gazelles. That would be fashion students, graphic designers, the black collar worker would start to wear the Gazelles because they want to ape the musicians and the cultural icons that they see in it. And you start to see it then in more wider distribution. So you start to see it being sold in department stores like Selfridges and Harrods. You'd start to see it being featured on the less niche publications. It'd start to be featured in Vogue or it would be in, in those days it would be Sky Magazine, and then you would see it then be adopted by the late markets.

So basically, the general public. You'd see it flying off the shelves in JD Sports. It would be everywhere, in all schoolyards and everywhere. So the volume at that point would be huge. It'd be a multimillion dollar or multimillion pound volume. It would be a 69.99 shoe instead of a 150 pound shoe and then, as it permeates through there, you'd see it start to proliferate in terms of colours. It would go from just being navy and white and red and white to many colours. They'd start to colour the stripes and it would proliferate so that Adidas could make as much money as possible before it moves into the, from late market, into laggard and it's in laggard it starts to be on sale in things like Sports Direct. It starts to be discounted and you want to try and avoid going into laggard. But what that means is, once you understand the diffusion of innovation, the diffusion of your product through opinion leaders, into the early adopter, into the mass market, into the late market and into laggard, you can start to identify the levers that exist there.

So, offline, who are the distribution channels that exist in opinion leader, late market, I'm sorry opinion leader, early adopter and early mass market? Who are the distribution channels that exist offline? Who are the right magazines to be seeding that product into? Who are the right celebrities to be trying to seed as ambassadors for that product? Because our job is to understand that it's a fast flowing river and if we position our product in opinion leader distribution but we then feature that product in early mass market advertising, then we'll accelerate its journey through the product lifecycle and we'll waste some potential volume that we've created. So really, an understanding of the diffusion of innovation is really important. We've deployed that many, many times. We deployed it at Levi's. So, for example, Levi's vintage was opinion leader, but Levi's red tab was earlier adopter and early mass market and Levi's orange tab was late market. So we used our ability to design a product architecture to manage the life cycle of the brand through the diffusion of innovation.

Similarly, at Converse we used the Converse x Jack Purcell as our opinion leader. We used the Dr J as our early mass market. We then used the OneStar as our mass market and we used AllStar at that time as our late market product and it helped us manage the diffusion through. It's really important you do it. It's really important that everybody understands it so that your PR agency or ad agency or media buyers and your sales guys are all working in tandem. They know which product is in which section of the marketplace and in doing that it means everything is fully integrated. People don't give enough credence to the fact that you can do loads of really good work inside the brand, but you will be defined by where you're seen. So you'll be defined, the brand you can make, you can think you've got the coolest brand in the world, but if you're someone, a salesman that's not on point, sells it into a high street store, then immediately it's not seen as the coolest brand in the world. Similarly, if a PR exec puts it in a mass market publication and you're trying to seed it into the marketplace, you've just wasted a lot of hard work. So it's really important everybody's fully integrated and everybody understands what they're doing.