The Defeat Of Lining'S Professionalization: The Brand Positioning Is Complex &Nbsp; The Market Has Been Attacked Before And After.

The local sports brand mainly implements the market strategy of rural encircling the city, and achieves rapid growth by opening up new stores in the two or three richest cities.

But Lining was born in a hardly competitive environment. He relied on the natural growth of the market for a long time to expand the scale slowly, and luckily became the domestic brand leader.

Therefore, when domestic brands like locusts eat into the market, Lining can not make a powerful counterattack, which will pay for his unstable position.

Especially in the context of China's long term inflation, rising rents and labor have greatly increased the cost of terminal retail stores, and the products themselves have risen with the rising prices of oil, cotton and labor.

Although Lining announced a commitment to help dealers cope with the pressure of rising costs, it will increase the discount rate to dealers, but this may not be able to compensate for the sharp rise in costs and stimulate the withdrawal of dealers.

In addition, there is a ghostly channel challenging the traditional store mode, that is, online shopping.

Because sports shoes and other products have standard size measurement and are suitable for sale on the Internet, many B2C websites specializing in the sale of shoes have appeared in China. Their competitive prices are also attacking the traditional store mode.

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In the game of rising costs, foreign brands have advantages, such as Nike has closed factories in China and reduced orders, most of which come from cheaper countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh and Malaysia, and they also maintain a reasonable profit because of brand premium.

Although low quality domestic brands are not satisfactory in quality, they can maintain a certain price competitiveness.

Lining is not so lucky. First, its price is much higher than that of other domestic brands, even most of them are flat with Nike or Adidas.

At the same time, Lining obviously does not have the attraction of foreign brands, and the outdated design is not favored by young people who are the main players of sports consumption.

Specialization exploration

It is not objective to attribute Lining's predicament to competition, cost and other market factors. Rather, Li Ning Co has lost its core competitiveness for many years because of its lack of positioning.

First of all, Lining's brand comes from the name of "gymnastic Prince", which makes the brand entangled with individuals. At the beginning, he may be helpful to promote, but there is a fatal mistake: in the eyes of generations of young people, Lining may be an overly conservative brand, which, to a certain extent, has affected the attraction of Lining brand to young people.

After 2000, Lining made the first choice in the direction of professional field.

It has sponsored almost all kinds of sports and many teams at home and abroad. It wants to imitate the sponsorship mode of international brands and set up professional characteristics.

But in China, the mainstream consumers of sports brands are leisure oriented youngsters. Chinese people seldom exercise. Therefore, sportswear is used as a casual wear. Lining's professional evolution is not attractive.

Moreover, the sport sponsored by Lining is too complex to establish a strong association between Nike and basketball, Adidas and soccer.

However, Lining's professional exploration has given China more space for the rise of leisure sports brands.

In the front and rear of the market, Lining looked for new positioning.

In June 30th this year, Lining announced the change of LOGO, playing the "Lining, 90" positioning.

It has to be said that this is a bad action, because Lining's consumers are mainly dominated by the two or three tier urban middle class aged 35-40, and the new positioning will probably abandon these loyal customers. But for the more critical "post-90s", Lining is obviously a very old Chinese traditional brand compared with the very cool international brand.

The new strategy means that Lining has to start from scratch. This is a great adventure and nothing seems to change today.

In fact, the story of Lining's growth represents the plight of the whole Chinese manufacturing industry, that is, it is difficult to establish a strong brand, just like the earliest household appliance enterprises in China.

Almost anyone can engage in manufacturing or business, but the brand needs genius, reputation, creativity and perseverance, and China lacks this capability.