Page 189 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

178 • Sport, Media and Society

this link, a grey and white page appears with a choice of country divided into fi ve

areas: the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and South Africa, and a fur-
ther global site ‘if your country isn’t shown’. In total, there are thirty-three differ-
ent national sites, including two for Canada—Canada and Canada (French)—and a
catch-all site for Latin America (Latinoamérica).
Common to all of the national Web sites is a series of larger hyperlinks running
down the right-hand side of the window, each showing a clickable image of a shoe
from the various product ranges, ‘Performance’, ‘Originals’ and ‘Y-3’, each with its
own version of the Adidas logo. An additional link to the online shop appears on the
home page of the US, UK, Canadian and German sites, with an invitation to select
a product catalogue or a store or to ‘sign up’ on the remaining countries’ sites. By

rolling the cursor over the first link to the ‘Performance’ clothing line, a menu ap-
pears to the left, displaying a series of rollover buttons to take the user to the various
sport collections. While this is a feature of all of the national Web sites, the options
can change by country. For example, in the United Kingdom, the choices are Foot-
ball, Running, Basketball, TechFit (for clothing made from technologically innova-
tive fabric), Tennis, Cycling, Women, Stella McCartney (for the fashion designer’s
clothing range), Porsche Design Sport (for men’s clothing designed for driving and
other activities), Eyewear and Watches. On the US site, by contrast, there are fewer

choices, the first of the selection being an invitation to ‘Shop Performance’, and
the other choices extending to Basketball, Running, Women, Soccer, MLS, Foot-
ball, Stella McCartney, Tennis and Golf. The Major League Soccer (MLS) button is
unique to the US site and links the user to a mini site called ‘represent’, containing

official songs recorded for MLS teams.
A consideration of the difference and similarity between the menu choices made
available to users in different geographical locations begins to illuminate the Web
site’s attempts to coordinate the experiences offered by the Web sites to the national
tastes of the users. Hierarchies appear a constant element across geographical bound-
aries (e.g. the product ranges are divided, always in the same ranking order, into
Men’s, Women’s and Kid’s). However, among the options available in the Perfor-
mance menu, ‘Women’ occurs higher in the list on the US site than on the UK site.
Running along the bottom of all national sites, varying sometimes by language, are
a number of small and discreet links common to all legitimate businesses, includ-
ing ‘Help/Contact Us’, ‘Careers’ and ‘Corporate Information’. Among this list is
a link to the ‘Adi Dassler Fund’, a charitable endeavour which lends an ethical di-
mension to the company. Sans serif fonts are used for all text. The most noticeable
difference between the national Web sites is the varying sound and moving image
sequences in the central frame of the country home pages, and the links forward into
different hypernarratives that they encourage. All the Web sites carry the strapline
‘Impossible is nothing’ and so present themselves as interconnected threads of a
shared narrative, but the specific manifestation of this narrative varies by country.