Who Can Win The Battle For The Big Sports Market?

Recently, sportswear Champion announced its cooperation with Foot Locker, an online sporting goods retailer in the United States. In the future, Champion's clothing, underwear, sweaty clothes, hats and tights will be sold in Foot Locker.

Prior to that, Champion has sponsored several Japanese Team GRAPHT, NBA 76 Philadelphia's Dignitas, North American Optic Gaming and other competitive teams, and Champion is also the official clothing partner of the NBA 2K competition League for many years.

Its partner Foot Locker is the new partner of this year's League of Champions League (LEC).

In the past, athletes, large traditional sports events and other sports have been regarded as the key to enhance the influence of sports brands, and now whether Nike, Adidas, Andrew, Lining, 361 degrees and other brands, began to regard the competition as a new way to enhance brand influence.

For example, SKT1, a Korean competition club, has worked with Adidas, Nike, New Balance, and FILA.

However, unlike traditional sports, competition is different from traditional sports in terms of events, audiences and forms of expression.

Sports big hit market

In 2018, Wedbush, a US brokerage firm, released a list of sporting goods market in Europe and the United States based on the earnings performance data of major sports brands worldwide.

Among them, the top five sports brands are Nike, Adidas, Puma, Andrew and New Balance.

Interestingly, the five sports brands were involved in the competition sponsorship.

Nike is the most popular brand.

During the S8 match last year, RNG's star player Jian Zihao (ID:Uzi) appeared in Nike's advertising film. This year Nike has launched a deep cooperation with LPL. In the next four years, Nike will become the official clothing partner of LPL. Its cooperation will include the design of clothing and sneakers in the LPL area, LPL joint sports products and other derivative services.

It is said that this is the most in-depth and extensive cooperation between E-sports and traditional brands so far. (related reports in the past: NIKE entered the game to sponsor LPL for four years, and the League of heroes 1 billion had a further revenue target).

Nike's old rival Adidas is still somewhat hesitant, though they first sponsored the Korean SKT1 club in the field of electric field in 2006.

At present, Adidas has only sponsored a French competition club Team Vitality, and has carried out some small-scale cooperation, such as joining EA Sports to create a special fourth tennis jersey for Real Madrid, Manchester United, Bayern Munich and Juventus, inviting BurNIng, strawberry and other electric contestants to participate in the try on activities.

Puma, the top third, entered the game this year.

First of all, he became a partner of the North American competition club Cloud 9 in the heroic alliance 2019 North American LCS spring competition. Not long ago, he worked with the Poland electric club AGO to provide specialized clothing for the latter.

Andrew, New Balance in the field of competition is just "tasted".

Andemar co authorized the joint T-shirt with KPL in 2018, while New Balance was the partner of the F1 competition League.

Lining, a local brand, is the most popular sports brand involved in the field of competition in China. It not only sponsored many EDG, Newbee, RNG, YTG and other competitive teams, but also acquired the Snake competition club with LPL seats by holding the company's extraordinary China for nearly 500 million yuan. (related reports in the past: nearly 500 million yuan acquisition of Snake, the extraordinary Chinese sports CEO Li Qilin how to pry the Lining brand by electric competition).

361 degrees was signed as early as last year in the QG competition club. At the same time, it announced its competitive strategy and launched a special competitive industry production line, producing products outside the stadium, including the competition culture, and the products that are aimed at improving the performance of the competitors.

361 degree competition strategy to create China's sports brand alternative first.

In addition, companies specializing in the design and production of competitive apparel such as ULT and esportclothing are also growing.

Brand needs differentiation, competition marketing

Newzoo, the international market research firm, predicts in 2019 the global E-sports market report that 2019 will be the first year of E-sports global income breaking $1 billion. The total number of global E-sports audiences will grow by 15% to 454 million, of which the number of Chinese core competition fans is expected to reach 75 million, and by 2022, the number of global competition revenues and users will reach an astonishing 1 billion 800 million US dollars and 1 billion people.

Brands are just looking at the characteristics of high traffic flow.

Past facts have proved that sports brand sponsorship team can bring incredible profits to the brand, especially when the team performs well.

For example, in 2014, after winning the world cup in Germany, nearly 40% of Adidas's jersey sales came from Germany, and sales of football equipment including jerseys exceeded 2 billion euros.

But at the same time, we also find that although sports brand entry is a trend, most brands do not have more in-depth sponsorship. The sponsorship scale is far less than that of traditional sports.

Although many traditional brands know the electric race, they do not understand each item, match or club of the competition. They often have questions such as "what are they watching", "where my audience is participating", "we'd better sponsor an alliance, a championship or a game dealer".

An expert who has been engaged in the traditional marketing industry for more than 20 years has told a sports big business reporter that it is not easy to persuade the leaders of traditional enterprises to sponsor the competition. "In the eyes of 60 and 70s people, the game is game. This cognition is basically deep-rooted, and it is hard for us to shake it up.

But now electric sports are becoming sports and appearing on the real Asian Games. This may be an opportunity to persuade more traditional enterprises to enter the games.

Apart from cognitive differences, most brands do not know how to conduct competitive marketing.

The head of CHARGE, an American sports marketing company, believes that brands should be more attractive to users through social platforms.

"Any brand that wants to participate and leave a lasting impression should adjust itself in a corresponding way, so as to create an interaction between them and the competition audience."

Collette Gangemi, the leader of New York's nine day team, has compared the influence of the athletes with the professional skateboards in 90s and early twenty-first Century. The two groups have very similar characteristics.

Over 60% of E-sports fans are between 18 and 34 years old, and the number of female viewers has risen to 30% of the total audience.

This also means that sports brands with more fashionable demand will prefer sponsoring competition. Compared with traditional football uniform or basketball uniform, the competition clothing has more imagination and brand can add more personality elements.