HSE and Adidas Collaboration as the New Way of Marketing Communications of a Sport Brand with Student Audience in Russia

The modern marketing communications in sports appear as a spectrum of integrated communication instruments divided into specific projects today. The HSE and adidas collaboration, seen as a full cycle cooperation between the major sports manufacturer and the progressive university, is one of such projects. This is the first time experience of a partnership between an educational institution and a player of the sports market in Russia, and their relationship is well beyond the sponsorship as it aims to establish the wide range of interplays, which altogether may be called «collaboration». This paper focuses on studying the partnership meaning for both sides, correlations between the held campaigns and their concordance to desired results and the role of the partnership in modern marketing communications system. To meet the established objectives the author will be using the qualitative method of interviews with experts coming from both HSE and adidas brand sides, the people who are responsible for the partnership to happen as well as with the student sport societies' leaders who had a chance to influence the collaboration. The interviews’ main goal here is to identify the essential aspects of the cooperation, the meaning of it, its influence on student consumer behavior, the potential and role of the collaboration as a communication tool in russian sport industry.