Adidas and "going to town on errands": does anyone in your brand understand customers?
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
These past couple of days I came across a very successful PR case that I think brands can really learn from.
It's Adidas and "going to town on errands" (进城办事).
A translation slip
What happened is actually simple.
Adidas had a product whose English description originally read:
pair it with jeans for errands around town
Meaning: wear it with jeans, good for everyday outings to run a few errands.
But the Chinese translation came out as a line with very vivid imagery:
Wear it with jeans, to get things done in town.
Once that line appeared, the feel was completely different.
What was an international sportswear brand suddenly became a very local Chinese scene. You picture someone putting on their good clothes, riding a motorbike or catching a bus, very earnestly heading into the county town to sort out some business.
In short:
Today I'm going into town to get things done.
At first this was very likely just a translation error. Maybe AI translation, maybe machine translation, and nobody fact-checked it properly before putting it up.
In the past, many big brands would immediately have deleted it, corrected it, apologised, and hoped it would blow over quickly.
What Adidas did brilliantly this time was not to treat it only as a mistake, but to understand what netizens were playing with.
Then netizens took the name Adidas apart and played with it:
Wear adi, do das. (穿 adi，办 das)
On the surface it's "adi" and "das", but the real meaning is:
Wear Adidas, do big things. ("das" sounds like 大事, "big things")
With that line, the meme was complete.
"Going to town on errands" has the imagery, and "wear Adidas, do big things" neatly works the brand name in. Simple, funny, down-to-earth, and memorable.
This kind of thing is very hard to come up with on purpose. Very often it grows out of the market by itself.
Adidas really did pick up the meme, launching custom "going to town on errands" T-shirts and amplifying it further in physical stores, official channels and outdoor ads.
Something that may have started as a translation slip ended up as a brand moment everyone wanted to join in on.
In the public sources I found, conservative reports said the topic had passed 1.5 million views, while some industry articles wrote that reads topped 120 million in a single day. Different platforms may count differently, but what's certain is that this was no longer a small joke. It was genuine social spread.
The people who really understand customers
What's most worth learning here isn't how perfectly Adidas did things from the start.
Quite the opposite: it started out wrong.
What was truly impressive is that when the market turned this mistake into a fun language, someone inside the brand understood it.
I think that's the point.
Many brands care a lot about brand positioning, and of course that matters. A brand needs to know who it is, who it sells to and where it stands.
The problem is that many brands stay at "what I want to say", without really entering customers' lives to understand "what customers are actually saying".
What do customers laugh at every day? What do they find fun? What looks very "low" but is actually very close to their lives?
None of this is figured out sitting in a meeting room.
Nor can it be done by hiring a team that floats high above, or one that knows nothing about local culture.
The people who truly understand customers are usually the ones closest to them.
It might be the local team, customer service, the livestream crew, the people who read the comments, the DMs and customer reactions every day.
Because they're not studying consumers. They genuinely live inside the consumers' language every day.
Localisation isn't translation
Adidas has made quite a few changes in the Chinese market in recent years. Since Yeezy went downhill, Adidas has had to find its brand rhythm again. I think one big change in China is that it's increasingly willing to let local teams understand local consumers, instead of just translating headquarters' global campaigns into Chinese.
Real localisation isn't translation. Real localisation is understanding.
Understanding how people in a place talk, how they joke, how they spend, and how they make a brand part of their lives.
This "going to town on errands" moment wasn't a big-budget ad or a celebrity film. It was simply a mistake the market picked up, and a brand that understood the market.
That's the hardest part.
Because many brands don't lack traffic. It's that when traffic arrives, nobody inside can understand it.
Netizens are playing with a meme, and the brand is nervous. Customers are expressing emotions, and the brand is checking its guidelines. The market has handed you a new language, and the brand feels it's "off-brand".
So the opportunity slips away.
Of course, not every mistake can become PR. The condition is that it doesn't hurt anyone or offend customers, and that the mood is light, fun and something people want to take part in.
But when such an opportunity appears, a brand needs to be able to hear it.
For me, the biggest reminder for brands is this:
A brand doesn't just sell products to customers.
A brand needs to enter customers' lives, understand their language and share in their emotions.
Brand positioning matters, but even the best positioning, without a real connection to customers, ends up as just a line in a PowerPoint.
Adidas's "going to town on errands" started as a translation slip and ended up as a very successful piece of localised PR.
This is well worth learning from.
Because building a brand today isn't only about asking:
How do I make customers remember me?
It's even more about asking:
Is there anyone on my team who truly understands our customers?