New Balance Brand Audit

BRAND AUDIT

New Balance was founded in 1906 by William J. Riley in the United States of America Marathon City Boston. Firstly, it was aimed at specially making orthopedic foot arch support and correction shoes. After more than a century of evolution and development, New Balance has become involved in sports shoes, sportswear, sports equipment and children's clothing and other multi-stream production line of integrated sports and leisure brand which was known for the world. This easy will audit New Balance in China, especially aiming at sportswear. It will focus on brand review, market and customer analysis of New Balance.

Brand review

Brand heritage

In 1989, New Balance launched in China for the first time and it failed. Because New Balance's US headquarters did not pay attention to the emerging Chinese market, they just took the form of recruitment of sales agents in China, the Chinese brand name in the mainland was also from Hong Kong. After 1998, New Balance with the name of "New Balance" reappeared in China, not only to recover the product of the Chinese agent, but also began to take positive measures to relaunch in China. On the one hand, New Balance took the product anti-counterfeiting code to prevent counterfeit goods. On the other hand, New Balance sent the elites from the United States headquarters to help relaunch into Chinese sports market successfully. In 2003, New Balance Trading (China) Co., Ltd. was established in China, which also indicated that, New Balance in the Chinese mainland market was re-sailing (Kai, 2016). In 2011, New Balance contracted product line, and its featured product is "3 +1" product portfolio, the retro jogging series. Furthermore, it also implemented a single regional business model. In 2013, due to the implementation of direct-sale store model, the outlets of New Balance were up to 886. In 2014, New Balance carried out dealer scale strategy, and the number of outlets more than 1600. It also increased the professional jogging shoes series investment, and New Balance has been among the top ten in Chinese sportswear market.

Brand Portfolio

New balance includes three family brands of footwear, it will analyse the strength, favourability, and uniqueness of the associations each brand has.

• America shoes: it was made by American original manufacture. It is a symbol of the status of honor, and political leaders and successful entrepreneur prefer it.
• Functional running shoes: jogging shoes can meet for the consumer needs of all level and provide consumers with excellent quakeproof and stability.
• Race shoes: New Balance has been the leading brand of running shoes, suitable for different distance competition.
• Cross-country running shoes: Cross-country running shoes is the leading brand, very suitable for outdoor cross-country sports enthusiasts.
• Children's shoes: the use of high-tech materials and lively design style, New Balance children's shoes are suitable for all stages of children, which is a leading brand children's shoes.

Sources of brand equity

It is widely known that the sources of brand equity include brand awareness, brand imagine, brand association. This part will be present by Brand Resonance Pyramid.

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Market and consumer analysis

Review of market

Marketing success requires building relationships with other company departments, suppliers, marketing intermediaries, competitors, various publics and customers, which combine to make up the company’s value delivery network. Therefore, it is necessary to have a clearly review of New Balance microenvironment.

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Figure 2: Brand share of China’s sportswear market until 2016

We can get from the figure is that China's sportswear industry has formed a fixed brand pattern, domestic and international key brand occupy the sportswear market. Domestic brands are mainly leaded by Anta, Li Ning and Xtep, etc. Foreign brands are leaded by Nike and Adidas, etc. Overall, the foreign brand market share is greater than the domestic brands, and New Balance in China's brand share maintained at the sixth place.

Competitive analysis

In terms of the first competitors of New Balance in sportswear in China, it must be Nike. As one of the world's largest sports brand in the past 20 years, Nike has become the most well-known world's sports brand, through successful brand promotion and market operation. Such as the use of events, celebrity endorsement of athletes and social media such as the Internet, mobile app and so on. Compared with New Balance, the most important reason of Nike’s success is his cultural marketing which can represent the brand culture, brand concept, brand image, advocated lifestyle and value proposition. Furthermore, from Nike's advertisements and the brand image, consumers can easily feel that the pursuit of Nike is professional sports and competitive spirit, which is on behalf of the Key words that help to generate value recognition. Different from the brand image and popularization of Nike's identity, New Balance is the favorite of political leaders and business elites, but the target elite line also makes New Balance brand image do not understand by many consumers. For example, to consolidate New Balance’s brand image, it focused on highlighting the "President running shoes" label in its marketing campaigns.