Bjorn Gulden: Ironically, they are kind of connected because I do believe that if you look at many retailers, they were over inventoried at the beginning of the year. They were really, really scared about the development in sales. I think most of them have seen a better sell than they expected, but of course, also at a higher discount. And ironically, I would bet that there are actually categories that might be under inventoried in the second half because the order book on certain categories is too low, and that people will start to chase certain products again at the back end of the year. If you look at Apparel, I think people will be over inventory until the end of the year and that you first will see a relief in ’24. But it’s pretty much the same picture, especially in the U.S., I think also for the trade as we are seeing. So they need the second half to get out of it and then maybe some other markets will recover quickly, but it kind of goes hand in hand.
Sebastian Steffen: Francie, we have time for two more questions.
Operator: Okay. Then the next one will come from Zuzanna Pusz from UBS.
Zuzanna Pusz: I’ll stick to the rule, so just two. The first question will be on some of the franchises you’ve been mentioning, Samba, Gazelle, Campus. Would you be able to tell us maybe — I understand that most of these franchises would even when we look at Stan Smith, Superstar, they’ve been historically quite cyclical. But I mean, how big can some of these — or have some of these franchises become in terms of sales in the past in terms of at the peak? So let’s say, Stan Smith, Superstar, in the last cycle, I think between 2015 to ’18 when they were very hot, how big were they actually getting, just so that we can get an idea of Samba, Gazelle, what is their potential? And then secondly, sorry, just a follow-up on marketing as a percentage of sales because it’s quite an intriguing topic.
But would you be able — now, I understand you don’t want to comment on anything that may have been done by management in the past. But if I look at my model, basically over the past 20 years, I think the lowest level of marketing spend as a percentage of sales was 12%. So clearly, I guess, if a more reasonable level is 11%, which to be fair, is the industry average and adidas was always above. Are there any specific buckets of marketing spend where you would say maybe the money wasn’t ideally spent? I know you mentioned a couple of things, but maybe if you could say what will be the top 1 that you feel like maybe wasn’t the best type of investment? So that’s my second question.
Bjorn Gulden: You know, Zuzanna, that marketing is very subjective and there’s no formula that tells you where to invest because if there was one, we would all invest like it but then the formula will be destroyed again, right? So marketing is 50% rational and 50% emotional. And you also have to remember that the component that goes into marketing over the last 20 years have changed dramatically. Performance marketing, Google Search and all those things didn’t exist only 10 years ago, and it’s now hundreds of millions to actually generate traffic on your e-com. And of course, that didn’t exist before. So it is a different, what should I say, buckets, and it’s very hard now to sit and say that, okay, with 11% or 12%, these are the changes we should have been done.
