The Dilemma Of Lining, A Chinese Sports Brand, Is High And Low.

As the announcement shows, the order volume fell in the second quarter.

Lining is the first Chinese sports clothing company to meet foreign brands.

The high-end brands of foreign capital, represented by Nike and Adidas, are beginning to reach the middle end, and a large number of domestic brands that occupy the market in the two or three tier cities also have enough strength to move from the low end to the middle end.

Lining, a domestic brand whose dream has advanced to the high end, has abandoned the competition with the low end manufacturers in the early years of the twenty-first Century, and turned to the field of professional development. This means that Lining has given up more market share and made the subsequent brands easily enhance the popularity of the brand, so that Lining today was surrounded by more brands.

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 such as locusts eat into the market, Lining, who is neither high nor low, 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, and their competitive prices are also attacking the traditional store mode.

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 of all, his 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.

However, it is not objective to put Lining's predicament simply on the market factors such as competition and cost. Rather, the lack of positioning in Li Ning Co for many years has led him to lose his core competitiveness.

First of all, Lining's brand comes from the name of "gymnastic Prince", which makes the brand entangled with individuals. In the early stage, 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. Especially when Lining is full of white hair, it affects Lining brand's attraction to young people.

After 2000, Lining made the first directional choice, namely, to enter the professional field. It sponsored almost all kinds of sports and many teams at home and abroad, trying to imitate the international brand sponsorship mode 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 30, 2010, Lining announced the change of LOGO, playing the positioning of "Lining, 90".

It has to be said that this is a bad action, because Lining's consumers are mainly dominated by the two or three line urban middle class from 35 to 40 years old. The new positioning of the products will probably abandon these loyal customers. For more picky 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 cruise the garden to see the razor clam, creativity and perseverance, and China lacks this capability.

The signal from Lining also shows that inflation is creating pressure on the manufacturing sector in China with excess capacity.

This needs to increase the consumption power of Chinese people or reduce a large number of unreasonable costs in selling prices, because the Nike sold in the United States is cheaper than China, which means that there are too many unreasonable costs in China's commercial circulation and taxation.

According to Hong Kong media reports, Lining yesterday clarified the ongoing reform of the distribution system, which means that the measures and closing shop are two different concepts, clarify the target of opening shop this year and next year, and maintain the shop to 7900 and 8500.

According to Hongkong media reports, Lining yesterday clarified the ongoing reform of the distribution system. One of the measures was to integrate about 500 to 600 distributors. Lining said that the measure and closing shop were two different concepts, clarifying the goal of opening shop this year and next year, keeping the shop open to 7900 and 8500.

At the end of June this year, Lining had 129 distributors and more than 2000 distributors, of whom more than 1700 distributors only operated 1 stores.

Lining pointed out that the reform of distribution system is to allow larger dealers to buy low efficiency distributors, and encourage large dealers to increase the number of direct outlets.

Lining emphasized that new shops were opened and closed every year, and the factors such as lease expiration and location adjustment were the main reasons.