High End Interview: Dialogue Between Adidas CEO And Lining CEO

1. what are the main development strategies in the coming years?

Herbert Haina: of course we must continue to enter China.

Brand strategy, fashion is one of our very important directions.

In 2000, we realized that in addition to consumers who focus on sports performance, more and more attention has been paid to sports.

Zhang Zhiyong: the first thing we should do in the recent year is brand, and the second is the reform of the channel.

Brand positioning I will no longer say that the real challenge for us is to challenge your abilities. The reason is that our driving force in China has grown, so long as we open stores and open 800 stores a year, the price of products is suitable for consumers. These two can be done.

But when your industry changes, the cost changes, and consumers change, you find that you are making retail products. If you want to increase the premium, how to achieve your brand premium will become a new challenge for the team.

2. how to define consumer groups?

Herbert Haina: we did a survey on the global scale, dividing the consumers into seven types, from the very athletic type to the otaku house, from very fashionable to very unfashionable.

We define the brand according to these seven types of consumers.

In addition, I do not agree that people who like fashion do not like sports.

Of course, we do not exclude individuals with exceptions, but generally speaking, sports are increasingly being pursued by consumers all over the world.

A customer may have different dressing styles in different scenes of a day, and we are just trying to provide him with different needs. This has been achieved successfully. We have several different styles and brands in the market.

If you are interested in sports such as basketball, football and running, then you can find your needs in our sports performance store, which is a traditional Adidas store.

If you are a fashion consumer and are much more interested in fashion than football products, you can also find what you want in our NEO store.

Zhang Zhiyong: the consumer group is rather complicated.

The simplest reason is different personalities, ABCD.

For example, a person's A personality accounts for 50%, B personality accounts for 30%, and C and D personality.

Everyone is a mixture of character and ABCD, but there must be a mainstream in ABCD.

So why is this person conservative, that person is reserved, he has his mainstream character.

The final share comes out, that is to say, add up the A of each person's character and add up B so as to make market positioning.

Understand this, and then always use his interest to communicate with him who is interested.

This person may be the first to buy Nike, but his B character may buy Lining.

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3. how will the layout of the first tier and two or three tier cities be arranged?

Herbert Heiner: no matter which market movement performance market is our main market, which accounts for about 70% to 75% of our sales volume, but in the Chinese market, relatively speaking, the demand for fashion is more.

In the next few years, we will increase sales of Originals (clover) and NEO.

Originals main selling City, NEO main line two or three line city.

Of course, fashion is very important, but we must not forget that sports products are the driving force for the development of our brand.

In the series of sports products, we will continue to sell sports products such as basketball, football and running to two or three tier cities, including fitness products.

This year, 200 NEO stores are expected to open, of which 50% will be in the more developed cities and 50% in the developed cities.

Zhang Zhiyong: the share of cities in the second tier cities should not be lost. If this is lost, the future will be lost.

Most of the companies are far higher than ours.

Now, the big first line market has been occupied by international brands.

At the same time, they are infiltrating the second and three lines. On the other hand, we have a group of early entrants.

So our choice now becomes very painful.

We need to keep up with the second line and hold up the second tier consumers.

4. how to deal with the pressure of rising costs?

Zhang Zhiyong: the cost changes this year are very intense.

I can expect to manage our labor cost, which is relatively controllable.

But the most difficult to manage is raw materials, because it involves some financial problems, and finally, the cost of management is relatively difficult, so this is also the root of our tips to the market.

We have started using some financial tools to manage our cost this year, such as hedging the price of our cotton and some rubber or nylon yarn, but this is not our intention to speculate. We are mainly trying to stabilize prices.

5. how do you feel about this change?

Zhang Zhiyong: we have experienced nearly ten years of growth, and the industry has changed at this stage. I have repeatedly stressed that we believe that the driving force of the industry will change in the future, so we are willing to go one step earlier and make some changes in management.

This change is just like that in 1997, when it began to experience a painful experience. So we believe that in recent December or 24 months, our brand communication and channel pformation, including product optimization and brand communication, are also a drastic change, but there is no way out. This is your final choice.