Skills Of Chinese Sports Brands

The 2010 World Cup in South Africa is about to start, and in the green field, a sports marketing war is also in full swing.

At present, many domestic brands have launched a series of football clothing related to the world cup, playing sports marketing cards.

Skill of facing the door

Experts say that in fact, the motivation for local enterprises to be so optimistic about sports marketing comes from a data: in the period of China's economic structural adjustment and social pformation, the sports industry is regarded as the green potential stock that is expected to stimulate the 2 trillion yuan market.

However, sports marketing is not a golden event. Enterprises lacking system, permeable communication strategy and long term marketing resource allocation plan often fail to achieve the established marketing objectives, and the huge cost of sports marketing often becomes a bottleneck for enterprises to deepen brand promotion.

At the head of Anta company,

Zhang Fasong, a marketing expert, said that China's local brands are hard to snatch the core resources of international competitions, and usually only take marginal or related resources.

If we fight to compete for the same sports resources, domestic brands need to pay a price 2~3 times higher than usual.

The problem is not just that, insiders believe that even if China's local brands take the resources of international competitions, the next problem is cost allocation.

For international brands, the cost allocation is carried out in the global market and the risk is reduced to the lowest level. However, the domestic brands that have not yet made the real sense of going abroad are able to complete the cost allocation only in the Chinese market, and the pressure and risk they bear are naturally much larger.

Overall, from the current level of development of local brands, competing for international competition resources is a trade war with low cost, high risk and high cost.

Therefore, the responsible person in Anta believes that local enterprises should take their own road, rather than simply copy the two "classic" road that Nike preempt international star resources and Adi to seize the international competition resources.

Aiming for future attack

Many Chinese brands who have tried sports marketing are thinking about the same problem: international brands are doing sports marketing, local brands are also doing, why are the results different? Why can Adidas become an indissoluble link with the Olympic Games?

"Very simple, because the former has more than 80 years of Olympic sponsorship history."

Experts believe that some marketing can produce sustained and long-term effects, mainly through marketing propaganda and interactive planning for consumers, producing fresh products and constantly interacting with consumer groups, forming a trend.

"At present, the sponsorship of sports events by domestic brands is generally in a chaotic situation of blindly following the trend and confusion."

Zhang Fasong said that this ignorant sponsorship will bring about two kinds of results: one is to bump into a mistake, and to get lucky enough to find a project that matches the brand image. Therefore, it persists and slowly accumulates experience. Two, after sponsoring a competition, it finds that it has not achieved the desired effect, so abandoning the original project and turning to other projects.

For enterprises eager for quick success and instant benefit, sports marketing is regarded as a short and fast marketing method.

Many enterprises only regard the top event such as the world cup and Olympic Games as a "hype opportunity". When the news value of the event disappears, the influence of the brand will vanish, and such failure cases can be found everywhere.

According to relevant experts, the domestic sports sponsorship trend began in 2005, and the current chaos will continue until around 2015.

"Truly successful event marketing should be a marketing campaign involving all the people."

Insiders pointed out that at present, sports marketing has not yet formed a great influence in the Chinese consumer groups, and the government is only aiming at the image aspect in publicity. It has not yet formed a concept of nationwide sports and fitness. "If the government can join hands with the enterprises to create a number of activities involving all the people, making a prelude or follow-up to the related events will have a strong and lasting promotional effect on the sports market.

It is believed that the sports marketing in the future is bound to move towards the direction of "the participation of the whole people".