Asics: Chasing a 2020 Vision

ASICS: CHASING A 2020 VISION

1. The company is considering changes to the marketing mix of the core ASICS brand. What would you recommend going forward on issues such as:

A) Product line: To change marketing mix of core ASICS Brand, first we revised product line by extending our target group to mid-tier segment. ASICS brand awareness is high among marathoners who constitute a core market of 2.4 million including half marathon and marathon finishers. Addition to core group, our target is also to reach 5K and 10K runners, a total of 8.8 million people mentioned in Exhibit 1. Thus, with the revised product line, we expect to target nearly 10 million people in total.  In new product line, the most important thing is to keep our gel technology in our products which is one of our competitive strength. Although it creates remarkable cost on products, we decided to keep this technology limited for new series. For instance, while our core professional line keeps having full gel technology under sports shoes, our new product line will have this feature only in heel part which is a critical part for shoes. By this way, we will be decreasing our product cost by keeping our main communication strategy for ASICS brand. With such a ‘cost minimization strategy’ in our new product line, our price position for new series will be around $100-$150 level which is quite lower than our current professional series (250 -400$) while matching with the price expectations of our newly targeted segment.

B) Channels to market: Anticipating the changing trends in sports wear industry where the number of marathoners decreases while the group of people running for health and leisure reasons increase, we also reviewed the customer-facing structure of the company and realized that there needs an optimization strategy for the store numbers and locations. In total, ASICS has 785 stores located mainly in East Asia, whereas the number of stores is limited in other regions like America and EMEA. Compared with Nike and Adidas which are far bigger in business size than ASICS, the number of ASICS stores may be considered as even high. Our ‘optimization strategy’ here aims to assess whether our stores are located in the right locations enabling us to attract mid-tier segment. We plan to utilize market research studies here in order to better understand where those mid-tier people live and what their main shopping behaviors are. As we set ‘expanding into mid-tier segment’ as a must-win-battle for the sustainable growth of the business, it is also required to be accessible to those people through relevant digital platforms as well since those people increasingly prefer purchasing goods online and gather information through smartphones and social networks. As provided within the case, only 17% of ASICS sales driven through e-commerce and there is a significant room to go for ASICS to increase e-commerce business as they move into mid-tier segment. Effective utilization of RunKeeper gets even more critical in that sense; differentiated promotional activities on RunKeeper (like offering discounts and social campaigns) would be attractive marketing initiatives for reaching out people in mid-tier segment.  

C) Communications: ASICS recently launched the “want it more” motto that involves performance aspect and similarity with other brands’ motto that damage marketing approach of ASICS in two ways. The first one is that highlighting performance and linking the brand to professional athletes’ alienates emerging market customers, especially runners for fun and health. In addition, familiarity with “tough fitness” marketing approach of other brands would affect the brand image negatively by being perceived as an imitation. Our proposal is to discontinue ‘want it more’ motto and new campaign should be initiated by focusing on mid tiers and including messages on comfort, health, leisure and design together or some of them since it needs to increase the awareness and attract the fun runners’ attention.

On sponsorship basis, ASICS, for years, has been keeping the main sponsorship of big marathons as align with serious runners’ brand image, but after increased sponsorship cost of New York city marathons, they decided to give it up that would be a new opportunity to canalize sponsorship to short marathons step by step because the number of marathon runners seemed to be plateauing, even declining compared to increase in the number of fun runners. Additionally, some special events such as short-distance running with celebrities could be organized to raise awareness of brand and strengthen brand perception of social runners. Beside formal organizations and social events, ASICS is known with FOOT ID technologies that propose the best shoes according to foot shape which would help touching to customers directly and create engagement on store level.  Finally, regarding to price concern of new trend runners, and 17% of sales originated from online sales in to consideration, more discount for products on ASICS’ own website should be offered to increase sales margin and clear inventory together.