Lining No Longer Sponsors National Gymnastics Team And Pays More Attention To Precision Marketing.

On the evening of October 7th, Prince Lining, the gymnast, appeared as the ambassador of the opening ceremony of the forty-fifth World Gymnastics Championships held in Nanning, Guangxi. The Li Ning Co is the sponsor of this Gymnastics World Championships.

Just 2 months ago, the cooperation between Li Ning Co and china gymnastic team, which lasted for 23 years, just came to an end. Li Ning Co, which has the priority to renew the contract, gave up the renewal of 2014~2017 years' strategic cooperation partners of China National Gymnastic Team.

For the company with the gymnastic prince, it is difficult to understand the cooperation between the gymnastic team and the national gymnastic team.

But judging from the curtain down of the Nanning Gymnastics World Championships, Lining himself and the full input of Li Ning Co in this event are showing to the outside world that Lining has never left gymnastics but continues to participate in different ways.

As Lining himself said in the media interview during the world championships, not sponsoring the national team does not mean giving up gymnastics. On the contrary, he will do his best to support the Chinese gymnastic cause, and more contact with provincial or even grass-roots gymnastics training level, such as supporting regional gymnastics competitions and establishing Lining gymnastics school.

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From the perspective of overall marketing strategy, the changes in the strategy of gymnastic support show that Lining is getting rid of the dependence on sponsorship of simple events, and the marketing means are also moving to diversify marketing of sports marketing, event experience, product experience and retail experience.

The sporting goods industry used to follow the rugged wholesale business mode. Around 2011, the local sports brand ended its rapid expansion in the past 10 years. Whether it is an international brand such as Nike or Adidas, or the local brands represented by Lining and Anta, the performance of the local sports industry has been growing bottlenecks.

In 2012, in order to reverse the decline, Lining invited over twenty years of experience in global retail management and led a successful pformation of Daphne, Guanghui automobile and other TPG partners Jin Zhenjun joined in charge of reform.

Since then, Lining has begun a radical reform, from streamlining the channel to marketing strategy adjustment, the company has implemented a thorough self reform.

In addition to providing goods and services, companies in the supplies industry are also looking for a business model that can generate more profit margins. When the pformation took place third years ago, the focus and clarity of Lining product line also brought about a revolution in marketing methods.

Why not sponsor gymnastics teams?

At the beginning of the company's founding, Lining's sponsorship of the gymnastic team was very clear and direct, that is, "let the Chinese gymnasts put on the Chinese brand and stand on the highest podium in the world.

Gymnastics is a symbol for Li Ning Co and himself. At that stage, gymnastics and Lining brand made mutual achievements. The gymnastic team helped Li Ning Co establish brand awareness, and let the world know the Chinese brand "Lining" for the first time.

Therefore, Lining, founder of Li Ning Co, also said in the interim performance of the company in 2014 that giving up the sponsorship of the Chinese gymnastic team was a difficult decision for him. "Gymnastics has trained me, this decision is good for the company, but it is very painful for me."

In fact, the market structure of China's sporting goods industry is a typical dumbbell structure. The market volume of both high-end brands and local low-end brands is very large, and the development of medium price market is relatively slow.

Take basketball shoes as an example, the product line with a price of more than 500 yuan or less than 300 yuan has formed the mainstream consumer market, while the middle end market of 300~500 yuan retail price is relatively small.

However, in mature economies, almost all industry brands are distributed in Pyramid, while a small number of people buy high-end products, while more people choose brands based on cost-effective.

After 2011, consumers' brand worship of sports goods began to weaken, and mass consumption began to return to reason, which promoted the whole industry to begin to pform into a Pyramid market.

What Lining did in the pformation period was to seize the opportunity of changing the trend of consumption and recombing his brand positioning. The breakthrough he chose was the mid end market.

Take basketball shoes as an example, the products cover the entry level products from 299 yuan to the high-end products of 999 yuan, while the price of the main products is concentrated in the 300~450 yuan price range. According to Lining's 2013 annual report material, Lining occupies about 37% of the market share in this interval.

Since the beginning of 2012, Lining has focused on core sports categories and established five major categories of business positioning, which are basketball, running, badminton, training and sports life. Li Ning Co believes that "these core categories are more widely used in China, and more people use these products".

The marketing strategy is always changing with the focus of the company's operation and product line. Lining said to commercial value, "Li Ning Co is no longer relying solely on past simple sponsorship strategies, but has begun to migrate to sports marketing, event experience, product experience and retail experience".

In fact, consumers' passion and understanding of sports are quite different from that of 10 years ago. The channels for consumers to contact sports are more diverse and have strong experience. The actual value of sponsorship gymnastics for Lining is also weakened by the distraction of consumers.

To be more frank, from a commercial perspective, the ROI of the sponsorship gymnastics team is not high.

Now sports products are more subdivided for more consumers. What they need is the fusion experience of sports and product function and fashion.

Therefore, for the current development stage of the company, Lining said to "commercial value", "Lining's brand development needs have also extended to create more first-class products and enhance consumer product experience."

Shrink front, precision strike

If we use a few key words to describe Lining's current sports marketing strategy, "precision" and "pragmatism" are undoubtedly the most appropriate two words.

Before 2011, the prosperity of the market led many brands to take the strategy of full scale expansion, but the products were too homogeneous, resulting in consumers not having to choose. However, as the market matured after 2011, the demand of consumers began to escalate, and the demand for specialization of products was greatly raised.

In 2012, when Lining joined hands with Jin Zhenjun in charge of the Li Ning Co, the Li Ning Co began to shrink the front line, focusing its energy and resources on the Chinese market and the Lining brand, and accurately investing in the core sports categories such as basket ball, running, badminton and so on.

Lining's current core categories have different precise consumer analysis, product and category value orientation. Lining is also building differentiated marketing strategies based on different needs of consumers, so that more potential target consumers can experience Lining's products.

For basketball players, Lining chose professional events and products as support.

2012 was a very difficult period for Lining's pformation, but it was "generous" to come up with 2 billion of the big deal, signed the 5 season's CBA League equipment sponsorship contract, although the move was widely questioned by the industry, but two years later, the data proved that the sky high investment did not "kick the bucket" as originally questioned.

The driving force behind this is Lining's advocacy of "sports marketing", which combines sports experience with product experience.

According to the relevant statistics, during the 2013-2014 season of the CBA tournament, 510 million people watched the game through CCTV5, and the total number of viewership was 540 million. The average daily click through rate of the CBA network video on demand website of the CBA league's official network partners Sohu was over 1 million 90 thousand, an increase of 36% over the previous season, and the CBA official video's clicking rate on PPTV was over 720 million.

For the sponsorship of basketball, Lining almost covered all the sports resources such as CUBA, CUBS, junior high school basketball league and so on, all of which made Lining brand and basketball more natural combination.

At the same time, Lining also signed NBA top player Dewayne Wade, and created his exclusive signature war boots, Wade's way, which really broke the long-term dominance of high-end basketball signature shoes from Nike and ADI.

Now that we need to be the most professional basketball brand, Lining must produce matching products.

In the three levels of high-end, core and foundation, Lining has launched cost-effective products to seize more market share.

This unique strategy includes the rapid expansion of the "Wade series" high-end product business on several product lines. Through the attractive medium price, Lining first realized the large-scale commercialization of professional CBA basketball shoes. In the basic price range, Lining launched entry-level practical basketball shoes with professional skills and fashion design sense, and at the same time, through the price advantage, began to recapture the market of student outdoor basketball shoes.

The bigger surprise comes from running product lines.

In fact, on the product line of running, Lining has accumulated many years of experience in product development. Li Ningchao has developed to the eleventh generation, and Lining arc has launched the fourth generation of products. Lining has also introduced more professional running products for professional runners, such as Yun Ma, Shuang Du and Lie Jun running shoes.

For running shoes, Lining adopted a completely different operation idea from basketball. On the one hand, it was related to the different ecological environment of the two sports, but on the other hand, Lining tried to run a new road different from traditional sports brand marketing.

Lining running is designed to provide professional runners with a product, service and event experience for runners so as to bring more enjoyable experience to runners.

Specifically, Lining starts from the small circle of core runners and pays more attention to consumer experience.

Lining provides trial and experience activities for professional runners, first accumulating experience in the middle class consumers for Lining products, and the functional design of Lining products has also been recognized by many senior runners.

In the past two years, the sport has become a fashion in the first tier cities. Lining has also taken the opportunity to launch a lot of customized running activities, such as sponsoring marathon races, running training camps and running activities, while Lining's 10 kilometer road race has developed from 3 stations at the beginning of 2012 to 10 cities in 2014.

In this relatively small sport of badminton, Lining still maintains sponsorship of the top events of badminton, shaping and strengthening the professionalism of Lining brand in badminton.

Lining has been sponsoring China's badminton team since 2009, and has continued to make breakthroughs with top professional equipment.

As for sports life and training category, Lining focuses on the fashion features while taking into account the product's sports function, and expects to drive the young female consumption crowd.

Lining worked with Seoul studio in South Korea to launch a self confession (Seoul studio) series, with the launch of Jung Soo Yeon in girlhood.