Domestic Sports Brands Need To "Subtract" For Olympic Marketing.

Unlike the Olympic Games, the "marathon" war of Olympic marketing has just entered the midfield.

In the increasingly fierce competition of Olympic marketing, brand enterprises should make subtraction instead of addition.

Anta's champion dragon suit wins Chen Ruolin's 10 meters platform again.

Get together Olympic marketing

In order to take the initiative in Olympic marketing, Lining, Anta, PEAK, and 361 sports brands have already targeted their respective territories, and have joined the Olympic marketing "commercial war", showing the trend of getting together.

For example, after the Beijing Olympic Games, Anta actively strives to become a strategic partner of the Chinese Olympic Committee during the period from 2009 to 2012, and has become a sponsor of the Chinese team's award dress. Its sponsorship amount is RMB 600 million yuan.

Lining and PEAK choose to host Olympic teams at home and abroad: Lining chose to sponsor five fantasy teams for Chinese gymnastics, diving, table tennis, shooting and badminton. PEAK chose to sponsor 7 Olympic delegations such as New Zealand, Lebanon and Iraq. 361 of those who were not to be outdone chose to sponsor North Korea and other national delegations in addition to increasing advertising in CCTV.

Careful viewers can easily find that there are only two brands in the Chinese gymnastic delegation's "outfit": Anta shoes, Lining socks and Lining boxes.

In view of the marketing campaign that the domestic sports brands have entered the midfield in the London Olympic Games, Zhang Qing, President of the key sports value research institute, said that this is a means for sports brands to boost market morale, and is also one of the measures for enterprises to reshape the market image and rise again to get out of the market predicament.

However, behind the bright Olympic Games, the domestic sports brands are faced with challenges such as market downturn, high inventory and declining profits.

Olympic marketing tragedy

Despite all kinds of risks, it is not enough to extinguish the enthusiasm of the major sports brands in China to actively participate in sponsoring the Olympic Games.

Especially under the influence of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the whole industry experienced a period of rapid growth in marketing and production.

However, after a short period of rapid growth, since the second half of 2010, the problems such as high inventory of sports brands, declining profits, blind marketing and other issues have been highlighted, even known as the "sequela" of the Olympic Games.

According to the annual report data released by various sports brands, Lining's inventory reached 1 billion 130 million yuan in 2011, almost two times that of 2008; Anta's inventory was 618 million yuan; XTEP's inventory was 671 million yuan.

While the stock prices were high, some sports brand profits also showed a downward trend. In 2011, Lining's net profit fell 65.2%, and PEAK's net profit fell by 5.4%.

According to the data provided by Zhu Meng, a management consultant, the inventory situation of the industry has not been well digested so far.

According to the Anta announcement, 2013 orders for the first quarter will be reduced by 20% to 30%, and Zhu Meng believes that this is mainly due to its consideration of inventory adjustment.

The inventory problem of other brands has not been fundamentally solved.

Before 2008, the domestic sports brand has passed the growth period of nearly ten years.

At that time, the industry generally agreed that the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing will bring the whole industry to a peak.

Nowadays, brand building and promotion are becoming more and more important.

However, few people have foreseen that this opportunity is implying a crisis - the misjudgement of policy makers on market demand.

Due to the optimistic anticipation of market demand and consumer's enthusiasm, Lining, Anta and other domestic brands have launched new clothing, shoes and souvenirs. After the introduction of new clothing, shoes and souvenirs, the current situation and influence of the decline of European and American economies and the weakening of domestic market demand have gradually become a reality. Even Adidas, the biggest sports brand in the world, is hard to escape.

To this day, Adidas is still beset with problems such as high inventory, Olympic marketing and so on.

Today, it faces a more pressing problem: it has no way to overcome the obsession of Nike, Lining and other brand marketing.

Olympic marketing needs to be subtractive.

As a sponsor of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and an important international sports brand, Adidas did not gain instant marketing results because of its sponsorship of the Beijing Olympic Games.

Despite the introduction of various protective measures by the London Organizing Committee, Nike and Lining's marketing are still doing their best.

Recently, Lin Dan won the London Olympic Games and Chen Yibing lost the gold because of the miscarriage of justice. His rival Nike immediately launched a series of advertisements to "live your greatness".

The advertisement is popular on the social networking sites, such as micro-blog, which is mainly driven by young people. This undoubtedly proves that Nike is obviously slightly better in Olympic marketing.

Lining has also launched an advertisement similar to Nike and launched inspirational advertising slogans which are mainly in line with young people.

However, Lining mainly sponsored the delegation in London Olympic Games, and PEAK and other brands also had similar actions.

In this way, when brands realize the value of Olympic marketing, they also share similarities and differences in marketing strategies.

However, there are still people in the industry to remind China that the Chinese brand is so popular.

The main battlefield of the Olympic Games in China is that the London Olympic Games can not attract the attention of the Chinese mainland as the Beijing Olympic Games. Therefore, it is not appropriate to place too high expectations on the London Olympic marketing.

From the point of view of Olympic marketing, the brands must do subtraction instead of addition.

Enterprises should lock in the main direction and highlight their differences.

In addition, we should expand investment beyond brand promotion and channel expansion, such as product development, category management, better combination of wholesale and retail channels and better user experience.