adidas Group Steps up its Game with Neo4j to Personalize the Customer Experience

adidas Group is one of the world’s most famous and valuable brands, producing more than 600 million sports and athletic products every year and generating annual sales of €14.5 billion. But the company wanted to step up its game in offering a more personalized experience to online buyers.

Enter Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database, which is helping adidas Group achieve top performance in tackling master data management to provide the best content to its consumers, partners, brands and more.

“The rapid adoption of graph databases and Neo4j demonstrates the growing demand for organizations to leverage the relationships within their data for valuable business insights,” said Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo Technology. “Whether it’s to help direct a Lionel Messi fan to a specific football product on a website, or tailor content based on a consumer’s favorite basketball team, graphs are enabling companies like adidas Group to deliver new features such as product recommendations and more.”

As with many large retailers, adidas Group was beset by a wide range of information silos, including data about products, markets, social media, digital assets, brand content and other critical areas of the business.

Without a way to effectively consolidate such data, the Group felt it was missing out on opportunities to better provide the most compelling and relevant data to its consumers, as well as offering enhanced features such as product recommendations.  Additionally, adidas Group had to grapple with a need to provide data access to its internal teams, partners, IT units and others in a way that was fast, reliable and searchable. “We have many different silos, many different data domains, and in order to make sense out of our data,” said Sokratis Kartelias, senior project manager, adidas Group. “We needed to bring those together and make them useful for us.”

The Neo4j graph database proved to be the ideal technology for creating the Group’s internal metadata service, offering access and searchability to all data, along with support for new emerging services. By using the power of Neo4j, adidas Group is able to tap into the full range of its data to make sense of complex interdependencies and relationships. The result is adidas Group’s ability to provide valuable business insights to the benefit of its consumers, business goals and promotion of its brands.