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BRANDING BY ASICS

Asics is overhauling its marketing strategy and plotting a big expansion of its store estate as
part of its biggest brand shakeup in a quarter of a century.

The Japanese sports brand is best known for its running gear, but wants to broaden its appeal
amid wider growth in the market for fashionable sports and outdoor wear.

The relaunch kicked off in London this week – timed to coincide to the start of the athletics
World Championships that start this evening (4 August) – with the launch of a new global
marketing campaign ‘I Move Me’ by agency Saatchi & Saatchi LA. The platform builds on
the founding philosophy of Asics’ founder Kihachiro Onitsuka, who founded the brand 70
years ago in war-torn Japan under the belief that sport could help relieve distress.

Asics’ CMO Paul Miles admits the sports brand has struggled to communicate its purpose
effectively in the past. And that while it has a perception for producing high quality technical
gear, it has not done as good a job of having an emotional connection with consumers.

“We needed to have a way to talk about all our brands and our philosophy at one time,” he
tells Marketing Week. “We don’t see I Move Me as a campaign, it’s an articulation of our
mission to get people moving.

Retail is another brand communication channel. That is why we have to open more stores
because it is a channel to communicate the brand with our consumer.

Paul Miles, Asics

“We’ve always been seen as highly technical, with all the gear people need for long-distance
running, and people trust us on this and we’re proud of that. Core performance sports will
never go away for us because that’s really part of our DNA. But it’s not all we do. We have
more product and services we want to deliver and we haven’t really talked about them
before.”

While I Move Me is the brand’s global marketing platform, it will have local iterations too.
In London, for example, it will take the form of ‘I Move London’, with Edelman creating a
campaign for the capital that includes brand films (see below) and a light installation that will
tour the capital encouraging people to move.

There will also be social and digital activity as Asics looks to better engage with consumers
and create a more emotional connection.
An emotional connection is something that is really important to us. We have always been
very stoic [in our messaging] in terms of our technology and that is very important but this
emotional connection and engagement we haven’t been able to do so well,” explains Miles.

Miles also admits that in the past Asics has been guilty of changing its marketing too often,
making it hard to build brand equity. The plan is for I Move Me to run at least until the
Tokyo Olympics in 2020, where Asics is a sponsor, “and hopefully beyond”.

Asics released Action Plan in August 2018 and announced new organizations and personnel
changes the following October to rapidly put Action Plan in motion. Asics was have created a
new business structure based on product categories, which brings the current functional units
under an organization aligned with the new categories. The headquarters have even more
profit/loss accountability than before and are tasked with promoting profitable growth as an
entire Group, together with subsidiaries. Due to the challenges of making the shift
immediately in all categories, they began by making the strong-performing Onitsuka Tiger
Division an independent business division, which serves as a kind of in-house company. This
is our first move toward category-based management and organizational administration that
integrates production and sales. Leading categories will be given considerable discretion to
advance their businesses, providing a model for other categories to follow.
When asics formulated their business plan for 2019, asics conducted discussions with each
executive responsible for categories, subsidiaries, management sections, major related
companies and other units. During the meetings, asics reviewed their performance in 2018
and carried out detailed discussions about their 2019 plans. To ensure the product-based
management structure functions well, we conducted the meetings with the aim of
encouraging each product category and subsidiary to accurately align their targets. We
believe the meetings succeeded in having all attending parties hold close mutual discussions.
Leading categories have been given targets to work towards. Their role as management will
be to continually monitor progress towards those targets, take necessary measures as needed,
and establish a system to promptly respond to situational changes.
Also, in line with the objectives of Action Plan, asics will step up efforts in each of the
following priority areas by targeting resources on growth fields and improving profitability.

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