Say what you want about your brand. Your shoppers might not repeat it.

The words your brand wants to own aren’t necessarily the words shoppers use.

In the online Adidas conversation, posts are mostly listings and promos, and they’re full of brand language. The comments, where shoppers actually talk, are not.

Comments outnumber posts almost four to one, but you’d never know it from the language. A listing or promo post is about 140x more likely to call something “timeless” than a shopper’s comment is, and “iconic” follows the same pattern. The brand’s words are everywhere in the posts and barely show up where shoppers are talking.

That doesn’t mean shoppers don’t think Adidas is iconic. It just isn’t their word.

What shoppers do talk about is how things look and fit on them. For every one comment that says ‘iconic’, about 17 say ‘style’ and about 15 say ‘fit’.

On a TikTok about the Adidas Superstar, one shopper writes: “I have these but idk how to style them 😣”. On Reddit, another says: “Evos (and most adidas in general) fit super narrow across the forefoot.” Both are about the shopper wearing the shoe.

The problem is that brand measurement often starts from the qualities a brand chose for itself. The question for a tracker is whether it captures what shoppers bring up themselves, alongside the qualities the brand wants to own.