This is a pair of sports shoes with bold color and composition. Although it is difficult for some people to understand the designer's idea, in the eyes of many players, this shoe is an excellent work in the field of fashion shoes in recent years.

The key is that this ex-factory price of 899 yuan shoes, in the secondary market was once hyped to 3000 yuan or so. Unlike previous shoe manufacturers who have started with Nike Inc, Adi and AJ, this shoe is a purely domestic brand-from Li Ning Co. Ltd., an "old brand" of domestic sports.

Of course, this misunderstanding of brand awareness may be one of the important reasons why Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's shoes have been hyped on the Internet.

It is no exaggeration to say that Li Ning Co. Ltd. has transformed from a sporting goods company into a trendy brand since 2018. At present, when young people talk about Li Ning Co. Ltd., they don't care much about the sports function of his products, and they still like its design and the trend it represents.

Li Ning Co. Ltd., who is invited to Paris and New York Fashion week every year, has also been recognized and accepted by the international fashion industry.

The sporting goods company, which was founded and operated by the Gymnastics Prince under the name of the Gymnastics Prince, has come to a dead end for a variety of reasons in the course of 30 years of development. how is it that Nirvana is reborn, reinvented and changed?

This issue has now become the focus of attention of the industry, the media and economic experts.

"curry favor with the post-90s generation" suffered a complete rout.

As a top athlete, Li Ning Co. Ltd. is extremely sensitive to the smell of sports business. Li Ning Co. Ltd., which was founded in 1990, won 15 million of its sales during the Beijing Asian Games.

In 1992, Li Ning Co. Ltd. was unveiled as a special award-winning suit for the Chinese sports delegation at the Barcelona Olympic Games, ending the history of Chinese athletes wearing foreign sportswear at the Olympic Games. Since then, in the three consecutive Olympic Games, Li Ning Co. Ltd. has been firmly in the "top spot" of sponsors.

From then on, the color matching of red and yellow has become the main tone of Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's sponsorship service for the national team. To the surprise of Li Ning Co. Ltd. and his management team, 28 years later, the young people who watched these Olympic Games and Asian Games grow up jokingly called the red and yellow color match "scrambled eggs with tomatoes" and linked it to the history of the country.

This seems to be an antecedent of Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's rise in the late national tide.

Around the top event IP sports marketing, Li Ning Co. Ltd. only five years to stand in the ranks of China's top sporting goods enterprises, in 1995 Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's business income reached 360 million yuan.

According to the Southwest Securities Research report, by 1996, the annual marketing income of Li Ning Co. Ltd. brand was 650 million yuan, and its market share exceeded 13%. At that time, the combined annual sales of international sports brands Adi and Nike Inc in China were about 400 million yuan. the total market share is about 8%.

This gave Li Ning Co. Ltd. the idea of competing with Nike Inc and Adi in the international market. he began to look for CEO candidates and devoted all his energies to the development of overseas markets.

However, "internationalization" was equivalent to an untraveled road for Chinese brands at that time, and as a forerunner, Li Ning Co. Ltd. was under great pressure and risk.

With the joint efforts of various forces, from 2001 to 2003, Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's revenue was 735 million yuan, 958 million yuan and 1.276 billion yuan respectively, with a compound growth rate of 31.8%.

In 2004, Li Ning Co. Ltd. successfully listed in Hong Kong. At that time, the turnover of the whole company exceeded 1.27 billion yuan, and the net profit reached 94 million yuan, far exceeding other domestic sports brands. The total revenue of Anta, the newcomer, was only 311 million yuan that year.

In 2008, the Beijing Olympic Games achieved the desire of Chinese sports brands to take off. At the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, when Li Ning Co. Ltd. held the torch to light the sacred flame with the image of Kuafu chasing the sun, it also ignited people's unprecedented enthusiasm for sports, and Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's brand value and influence also reached an unprecedented height.

In 2009, Li Ning Co. Ltd. had an annual sales income of nearly 9 billion yuan and opened more than 10, 000 stores, making him a domestic monopoly sporting goods giant.

However, a fact that can not be ignored is that the huge sales in that year were basically brought by low-and middle-end products, and Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's high-end products did not sell well at home and abroad-- in 2009, Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's dealers in Spain were on the verge of bankruptcy and American stores closed down one after another, repeatedly frustrated. As Southwest Securities mentioned, "Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's overseas sales have always been hovering at a low level."

More importantly, as Nike Inc and Adi pay more and more attention to the Chinese market, Li Ning Co. Ltd. gradually slips down the rankings in the Chinese market.

As early as 2003, Nike Inc snatched Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's position as "the first in the domestic market" for nine years; in 2004, Adi also surpassed Li Ning Co. Ltd. and ranked second in domestic market share.

Unwilling to be mediocre, Li Ning Co. Ltd. started a new round of reform.

In 2010, Zhang Zhiyong, then CEO of Li Ning Co. Ltd., decided to reshape the brand. At that time, he thought that what Li Ning Co. Ltd. wanted to conquer was the post-90s youth market, and that Li Ning Co. Ltd., which was founded in 1990, also happened to be a "post-90s" brand, so he made a decision to create a "post-90s Li Ning Co. Ltd.". Lock the target customer group on the young people in first-and second-tier cities, move towards high-end, younger, standard Adi, Nike Inc and other international brands.

In order to impress young people, Li Ning Co. Ltd. invited Wu Minxia, Zhang Jike and Lin Dan, the best-known young athletes in China at that time, as spokesmen to try to combine the influence of these people with their attraction to young people born in the 1990s. To promote the further development of the strategy of rejuvenating Li Ning Co. Ltd..

At the same time, Li Ning Co. Ltd. changed logo, using LI-NING more than Chinese Li Ning Co. Ltd., and changed the slogan from "anything is possible" to "Make the change". In order to improve his image, Zhang Zhiyong's most direct strategy is to raise the price of Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's products in an all-round way, raising the price of the core commodity from 250 to 300 yuan to about 400 yuan.

This is not only to be in line with high-end international brands, but also bear the cost of rising products, but such a radical strategy suddenly pushed Li Ning Co. Ltd. to the line of life and death.

After all, Li Ning Co. Ltd. hopes to impress the post-90s by changing their spokesmen, logo and advertising slogans, but this is basically impossible in the domestic market around 2010, and at that time, Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's consumers were mainly post-70s, and more than half of the consumers were between 35 and 45 years old, these people had more spending power than the post-90s who were in the school stage, so Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's post-90s strategy also "infuriated" regular users to some extent. It lowers their preference for Li Ning Co. Ltd. and their desire for consumption.

This is reflected in the entire market level, that is, Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's brand change for the post-90s generation was defeated like a mountain.

As the post-90s generation watched NBA grow up, they love Nike Inc and Adi far more than they accept Li Ning Co. Ltd.. In the past, Li Ning Co. Ltd. was a supplementary choice for many young people who could not afford Adi and Nike Inc. When the price of Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's products was raised, the brand image was not fully established. Therefore, it is impossible for many post-90s to buy Li Ning Co. Ltd.. They will buy Adi and Nike Inc at the same price. Cheng Wen (a pseudonym), who worked in Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's marketing department for five years, told bullet Finance frankly.

In 2014, three years after the implementation of the "post-90s Li Ning Co. Ltd." strategy, Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's annual turnover declined year after year. According to financial data, Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's revenue fell from 9.479 billion yuan in 2010 to 8.929 billion yuan in 2011, and then to 6.676 billion yuan in 2012, down 5.8% and 25.22% respectively.

"the key Li Ning Co. Ltd. was too radical at that time. Generally speaking, when entering a new market, you must protect the old market, but Li Ning Co. Ltd., like a bear breaking a stick, decided to focus on the first and second tier market and quickly gave up the third and fourth tier market. This gives Anta, Xtep and other domestic brands the opportunity to develop. Cheng Wen told bullet Finance.

In particular, Anta, after the rise of the third and fourth tier market where Li Ning Co. Ltd. "strategically abandoned", opened up a multi-brand layout through a series of acquisitions. For example, in 2009, Anta acquired the trademark use and management rights of FILA in China at a price of 325 million, focusing on the high-end route.

Soon, FILA not only contributed higher-than-expected operating profits, but also showed Anta that the brand layout in the professional market segment was worth betting-Anta's successful acquisition of the world's top sports equipment brand management company Yamafen Sports Amer Sports in 2018 caused an uproar in the industry.

"before, there were rumors that Anta made a gold plaque and wanted to give it to Li Ning Co. Ltd., because if it hadn't been for the change in Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's strategy, Anta would not have achieved the current Anta, and then Anta went public successfully. When talking about this joke circulated in the industry, Cheng Wen, who has left Li Ning Co. Ltd. for two years, is still full of regret.

After a strategic mistake, Zhang Zhiyong resigned in 2012, succeeded by Jin Zhenjun, an investment agency born in TPG. Perhaps because of the identity of the investor, Jin Zhenjun paid too much attention to the operation and the performance of the financial statements, and carried out the strategy of "only channel reform, not brand carding", which ended in failure.

By 2014, Li Ning Co. Ltd. had lost money for three years in a row, not only declining brand volume and declining revenue fluctuations, but also being overtaken by Anta, not to mention being left far behind by international brands entering China. In this operating situation, Jin Zhenjun decided to resign, Li Ning Co. Ltd. company suddenly entered the "dark moment", this is a critical period of life and death.

An accidental opportunity

Forced to do nothing, founder Li Ning Co. Ltd. came out of the mountain again and took back the scepter of management.

Li Ning Co. Ltd., who completed the knowledge reconstruction from the Guanghua School of Management of Peking University, did not completely abandon the management reform plan of Jin Zhenjun, a professional investor, but chose its essence to strengthen the carding of brands and product lines.

On the one hand, in terms of financial and channel management, Li Ning Co. Ltd. completely retained the plan left by Jin Zhenjun to reduce costs and increase efficiency and close unprofitable dealers and shops, so as to achieve healthy and sustainable financial development; on the other hand, he not only changed the advertising slogan to "anything is possible", but also stepped up efforts to support the R & D team of designers and sports technology.

He also believes that since the company has no experience in network operation, it should bring in a professional team to assist in management and operation. So he outsourced all the e-commerce business, only asking the price of the e-commerce to be the same as the offline price.

With this series of measures, Li Ning Co. Ltd. successfully stopped the loss for the company in just over a year, made a profit of more than 116 million in 2016, and returned to the ranks of domestic first-tier sporting goods brands.

But at this time, Anta has secured the position of the leader of the domestic sporting goods industry, Peak and Jordan are still closely chasing, the degree of fierce competition is self-evident.

When Li Ning Co. Ltd. himself led the team to find a breakthrough, a cross-boundary invitation completely broke the deadlock in the market.

In 2018, New York Fashion week set a subdivided theme, one of which was sports. However, as Nike Inc and Adi did not have a related schedule, it was impossible to arrange star designers to design new products for the entire Fashion week, so the organizing committee turned its attention to Li Ning Co. Ltd..

"when we received the invitation, the designer's department was in an uproar," Li Yiwei (a pseudonym), who had just left Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's design department for more than a year, told bullet Finance. "We were so excited that we didn't sleep well for two days. "after all, going to New York Fashion week is the lifelong dream of all fashion designers.

But to tell you the truth, Li Ning Co. Ltd. was close to the end of 2017 when it was invited. "We still had several series of designs in hand at that time, so it was difficult to spare extra time." In Li Yiwei's view, the cost of the company's participation in this cross-border activity may not be the same as the harvest.

"because the people who watch fashion are not the same people who buy sporting goods. Li Yiwei told bullet Finance that the whole company had discussed it for a long time at that time, and finally Li Ning Co. Ltd. decided, "go, even if it's just one successful marketing campaign." "

"I was really busy at that time, because we had to prepare 56 costumes according to the requirements of the organizing committee, and we went through all the new designs and found that there was still a shortfall of nearly 30 sets. Li Yi told bullet Finance with a smile that the tomato scrambled egg color suit was very popular in the end. in fact, it was a choice for designers to make up the numbers at that time, that is, they simply modified the tops and bottoms of different sets of jackets and matched them together.

When all the designs were in place, the company's marketing department responded: "these well-made clothing designs are not consistent with Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's sporting goods settings, and may affect the brand image." "so after repeated discussion, they put all the exhibitors under a new sub-brand, called 'China Li Ning Co. Ltd.'.

Another interesting thing happened here. When the clothes were delivered to Fashion week, the organizing committee put forward another request, hoping to increase the proportion of Chinese elements in these clothes. "therefore, Li Ning Co. Ltd. himself proposed at that time, or we classify this very different design as a series called 'Wudao', which is the reason for the emergence of the extremely popular Wudao series. "Li Yiwei said.

She also told bullet Finance that at that time, in order to make the sub-brand "China Li Ning Co. Ltd." quickly recognized by the public, but also to reflect Chinese characteristics, their design team simply sewed a large logo on the front chest of the clothes. Unexpectedly, it became the new logo of this sub-brand and became a hit. "she said with a smile.

In 2018, "Li Ning Co. Ltd. of China" landed at New York Fashion week with the theme of "enlightenment". It changed its previous seriousness and rigidity, even with a somewhat rustic brand image, and completely ignited the domestic and international markets.

On the day of the end of the New York show, Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's Wechat index jumped 700%. Three days after the show, tweets about Li Ning Co. Ltd. at New York Fashion week were exposed more than 15 million times.

"No one expected that more than 200 sets of clothes prepared for the entire fashion week sold out on the official website within two days, and orders flew in like snowflakes. Li Yiwei recalled that it was the most fulfilling day for their design department.

According to Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's internal statement, "China Li Ning Co. Ltd." prefers retro elements, which reminds consumers of Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's most brilliant moment, and it is a national symbol on the body, reshaping the brand image. People can't help but have a sense of national pride and accurately suppress the vaguely fluctuating "national trend".

According to the 2018 financial report, the annual sales of the "China Li Ning Co. Ltd." series of clothing exceeded 5.5 million, with a sales rate of more than 70 percent, and the Wudao shoes series sold more than 50, 000 pieces, with a sales rate of more than 70 percent.

"now a young man can say he won't buy Li Ning Co. Ltd., but he won't say he won't buy Chinese Li Ning Co. Ltd.. "this is the view of a well-known marketing expert when a media was investigating the attitude of domestic consumers towards sporting goods brands. Indeed, "Li Ning Co. Ltd., it's fashionable!" "this is the deepest impression that consumers have on Li Ning Co. Ltd., and Li Ning Co. Ltd. also complies with the trend and embarks on the national trend, focusing on the fashion strategy.

Because of an accidental opportunity and the rise of the national tide, Li Ning Co. Ltd. has reversed its fate and fought a beautiful turnaround from its previous "textbook-level failure" to being sought after by young people.

New consumption enthusiasm ignited

In fact, in 2018, the rise of New York Fashion week, Li Ning Co. Ltd. was called "the first year of the national tide" by domestic economists, and "the rise of the national tide" in 2019.

Looking back in 2018, the national tide was first blown up by Li Ning Co. Ltd., followed by the Imperial Palace and Dunhuang. Then, a series of CCTV programs completely ignited the trend-- "I build Cultural relics in the Forbidden City", "Poetry Conference", "National Treasure" and "New Forbidden City" have become popular programs of that year. At the same time, online IP movies and TV dramas such as "12 hours of Changan", "Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace" and "Qingyu years" have sprung up in the wind, and films promoting the spirit of Chinese culture such as "Nezhu", "wandering the Earth" and "Jiang Ziya" have also become very popular.

Behind this trend is the iteration of a group of main consumers. Because the post-1995 and post-00s are completely different from the post-70s, 80s and 90s, and if you study them with traditional sociology, you can't put an appropriate label on these people.

After all, these groups have different birth background and growth environment, not only have different times, but also have different outlook on life and values, and their economic strength is also different.

But under the new consumption trend, they have something in common, and these commonalities are of value to every participant in the market.

In fact, more and more Z-generation consumers no longer unilaterally pursue the show-off and display attributes brought by high prices when making their own consumption choices. "only buy what is right but not expensive" has become a consumption trend.

In other words, the consumption of consumers in the past is spending money, and now the consumption of Z-generation consumers is consumption itself.

And thanks to the long-standing popularity of the Internet, this generation of young people have already learned to filter out noisy and useless voices, and with the help of global connectivity, they have the ability to form their own opinions.

Before 2000, China was in an era of material shortage and rampant imported foreign brands, so consumers subconsciously advocated foreign culture for a long time. Hong Kong, Hollywood, Korean Chao and Japanese style became the hot spots of consumption at that time is a typical portrayal.

However, with the rise of China's national strength, after more and more young people gradually understand the aesthetics and culture of the West, they turn around and find that Chinese traditional culture is actually more attractive.

More importantly, contemporary young people are more and more daring to express their individuality. they believe in their choices and believe that the people who understand them are friends.

With such self-confidence, anything that can express their character and aesthetics can attract them; any behavior that can show themselves is willing to participate in it; and any way of life that reflects their attitude will be actively pursued.

Therefore, in the quintessence of Chinese culture, they began to understand the civilized art that has been passed on for thousands of years, and to understand the oriental art that "she is always beautiful regardless of light makeup and heavy makeup." this is the aesthetic of Oriental people.

In fact, Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's successful counterattack this time is also closely related to such a new consumption trend.

After all, Li Ning Co. Ltd., who rises with the development of Chinese sports and economy, is a brand symbol about China's development accepted by young consumers who enter the market at present.

In the subconscious of many people, red and yellow sportswear equals China, the image of patriotism, and Li Ning Co. Ltd.. Therefore, when Li Ning Co. Ltd. launched a retro sweatshirt with a clear Chinese culture at New York Fashion week, it instantly ignited the hearts of young people yearning for the image of a strong and prosperous country.

Under the influence of extensive cultural identity and strong cultural self-confidence, with the mission of reviving traditional culture, new domestic products and national tide brands like Li Ning Co. Ltd. have exerted great penetration among Chinese young people.

In the past, young people were as enthusiastic about today's new domestic products as they were after the "European and American trend" and "Japanese and Korean style". In fact, following the trend is a common feature of every generation when they are young, but for the post-90s and post-00s generations, new domestic products are more like the spiritual meeting point between the international trendy culture and the Chinese national culture.

Therefore, if nothing happens, the story of the rise of "Li Ning Co. Ltd. of China" will certainly be told for a long time.

Because Li Ning Co. Ltd. used to be a symbol of China.