Sports Shoes Anta: Channel Is The Real Magic Weapon.

January 24th, "success."

Anta: fine infiltration of sports marketing

"Sports stars + CCTV advertising" can only be regarded as an inducement of Anta's success. Its real magic weapon is a strong sales network.

But first line brand is strengthening channel penetration, and the three line brand is stepping up its brand building. How can Anta cope with both sides?

Channel is the real magic weapon.

Anta's success has been described by many as the "star endorsement + CCTV advertising" mode. This legendary case is said to have been incorporated into the MBA case database of the business school.

Ding Zhizhong, President of Anta, is the earliest entrepreneur with brand awareness in Jinjiang.

At first, Anta was only one of 3000 shoe factories in Jinjiang. In 1997, Anta's sales volume was only about 50 million yuan, and its profit was only 5% to 8%. Moreover, although Anta had worked hard to set up several times more sales outlets in the one or two and three tier cities of the country, but because of these agents Acting many products at the same time, Jinjiang's small brands were very messy, so these sales networks could not play any role at all.

It was not until 1997 that Ye Shuangquan, the marketing leader, invited Ding Zhizhong to tell the story of Nike's rise with sports stars. The two people hit it off.

In 1999, Anta signed the table tennis world champion Kong Linghui at a cost of 800 thousand yuan per year, and produced almost 5 million yuan of profits in the first half of the year to advertise on CCTV sports channel, which was absolutely an astonishing move at that time.

In 2000, Kong Linghui won the men's singles champion of table tennis at the Sydney Olympic Games. At the same time, he shouted "I choose, I like" slogan on TV, and Anta almost fired.

In 2000, Anta's sales exceeded 300 million yuan, 6 times that of 1997.

The success of Anta has attracted a large number of clones. Jinjiang's sports shoes brands have hired sports stars as spokesmen. In 2003, there were up to 44 brands of Jinjiang sports shoes on CCTV sports channel, and CCTV sports channel was also nicknamed "Jinjiang sports shoes channel".

But this kind of competition means that thousands of people and homogenization did not bring success to the successors. 2004 "successful marketing, the most competitive brand survey report of the new generation" shows that Jinjiang brands such as del Hui, XTEP and Buick have not appeared in the list.

In fact, careful analysis, "sports stars + CCTV advertising" can only be regarded as an inducement of Anta's success in the Chinese market. Its real magic weapon is its strong sales network.

From the "successful marketing" and "the most competitive brand survey report of the new generation", we can find that in both the mass market and the university market, Anta's brand penetration index performance is very prominent, ranking first.

Before he founded Anta, Ding Zhizhong had many years of experience in promoting the production of sports shoes in Jinjiang, and knew the importance of sales channels.

Ye Shuangquan also said: "the biggest advantage of Anta is its wide coverage. We will not let go of the one or two or three tier cities."

Anta's "star + advertising" really moves agents and distributors everywhere.

The author once participated in a shoe trade fair, and found that if there were huge vendors of star billboards before vendors stalls, they must be suppliers, even if no one could remember the relevance of this star and brand.

This is a unique phenomenon in the Chinese market.

Anta is the opportunity to rapidly upgrade the brand. It has made a comprehensive improvement to the entire sales system, and has rapidly pformed from distribution, counters to franchised stores, and agents to cooperate with the franchise mode.

At present, Anta has exceeded 3000 stores in the country, especially in two or three tier cities.

This is the main factor that Anta is ahead of the brothers in the city and can compete with the famous brands such as Nike and Adidas.

Positioning professional basketball shoes Market

In 2001, Anta coveted the casual wear business and signed entertainment stars to endorse canvas shoes and casual wear.

But not long after, Anta gave up the attempt.

Ding Zhizhong admitted: "we made canvas shoes, including entertainment stars, though they did not lose money, but they made some strategic mistakes.

Since we have chosen to do sports goods, we must have a choice and stick to it. "

Ding Zhizhong's "choice and persistence" refers to the market of basketball shoes.

Basketball shoes and all-around sports shoes are the most important and largest two product categories of sports shoes.

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Anta's annual R & D cost is about 10000000 yuan, which can not be compared with Nike's research expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars, but it is definitely high in Jinjiang.

The cost is mainly used to purchase technology patents from international brands.

In addition, an important consideration for Anta to choose a cooperative processing factory is to produce a relatively professional basketball shoe in the domestic brand by making use of the advantages of the factory to produce basketball shoes for Nike and other brands.

An important production cooperation enterprise of Anta is the Guangdong Bao Yuan group, which owns more than 100 production lines, and also does OEM for Nike, CONVERSE, Adidas and other brands.

In the absence of intellectual property rights, Anta and Nike almost use the same production line in China, but the shoe making materials are slightly different. "This is a more professional place than other domestic brands."

In carrying out the brand promotion, Anta is also closely tied to basketball.

Starting in 2003, Anta began sponsoring the Lithuania professional basketball "youth guard" Poseidon basketball club. In November 2004, Anta announced that it would sponsor the CBA League of China Basketball Association in the next three years. The sponsorship fee in the three years was as high as 60 million yuan, and the supporting funds for marketing, product development and other aspects accumulated over 120 million yuan.

Compared with Anta's clear and focused brand positioning, positioning ambiguity is the main reason for the poor performance of the once brilliant two star brand in recent years.

Zhang Jing, director of the Propaganda Department of the double star, said: "the positioning of double star shoes is from low end to high end, from sports shoes to leather shoes."

Market bottlenecks of economic and practical brands

Although Anta has been on the rise in the Chinese market in just a few years, we still have to prepare for the rainy day.

According to MunderCapitalManagement's survey, the size of China's sports shoes market is US $500 million, while the US market is US $7 billion 500 million. The market in China is still very large.

It is for this reason that the world-famous brand of sports shoes has been heavily deployed in China since 2003.

None of them is a master of fashion and brand operation.

By the end of 2004, TNCs launched a comprehensive penetration war in the Chinese market and invested a lot of energy in the construction of marketing channels.

At present, Adidas has more than 500 stores in China, and through the strategic cooperation with new agents, new Bai Lun has covered more than 80 cities in China in a short time.

At the same time, other Jinjiang brands also pay more and more attention to the construction of exclusive stores. In a pedestrian street in Changsha, there are 7 sports shoes stores, of which Jinjiang brand reaches 5.

If we lose the huge advantage of sales outlets, how can Anta cope with both sides?

Secondly, "star + advertising" has not played, how does sports marketing brand come out? In fact, in 2004 Athens Olympic Games, Anta's celebrity endorsement performance was not outstanding.

When Anta focuses its attention on professional technology to synchronize with Nike, according to the survey by the American sports shoes Association, the mainstream consumer market in recent years has paid less attention to the technology of sports shoes.

Philip Kotler said: "sports shoes have become an important fashion representative. It is said that when girls are invited to date, boys should first look at their sneakers."

This trend is also very evident in the Chinese market. The survey shows that Anta is still an economic and practical brand.

Yuan Yue, chairman of the zero survey company, said: "Anta, double star and Reebok are in the second group of Chinese sports brands. The problem faced by Anta is that consumers' loyalty is low and their linkage consumption ability is low.

Anta can not compete with Nike on high-end products, and has little competition with Lining in its low-end products.

The gap between the second group's products and the first group is very large, but the gap with the third group is very small, so if there is no clear direction in the market positioning, brand value is likely to fall.