Three Leaps of Domestic Leisure Shoes Industry from Product to Brand

Domestic casual shoes are still on the verge of brand building improvement. Brand owners are racking their brains to organize goods, and at the same time worried about the changes in the sales tables. Each terminal company waits for consumers to enter the store with the desired look. Experience buying and becoming loyal customers. This is the current market status of casual shoes. Almost all casual shoes use the comfort as a label for the product, with a view to becoming all the reasons for sales. Behind this is reflected in the casual shoes industry's competition is still stuck in product forces, brand strength is still lacking.

The practice of highlighting product features is understandable in itself. It is also an indispensable task for all brands to start. Many international first-line brands have experienced a long period of time from product to brand promotion before they can have a long-term foothold in the market, and the history is still more than a hundred years old. In the product characteristics of excellence, never dare to slacken. For domestically-made casual shoe companies, the degree to which the basic characteristics of the product are promoted is directly related to the pace of brand building. How far is it from productization to branding? This is a big issue facing companies.

Francis Guten, president of Richemont Asia Pacific, the largest Swiss watch brand and the world's second-largest luxury goods group, introduced that luxury goods entering a country or region must go through three stages. The first is to explore the road, tentatively conduct small-scale sales, and open up the visibility; the second phase is the period of re-education for consumers after having a certain reputation; the last stage is that consumers have a deep understanding of the brand. Clearly know what brand of product you need.

This may be a lesson for domestic companies, although we still have a considerable distance from luxury goods.

The first is the process of probing the road. This process is a process of product positioning, market positioning, brand positioning, and other tests, and it is also an extremely complex and difficult process. In this process, there are many product elements that need to be pushed to consumers, but there is one point that needs to be taken care of is that the advantages of the company are the best. The first thing to bear is the style development. If consumers want to leave an impression on a completely unfamiliar product, the best way is to create a visual impact at the first sight, so that consumers have a brighter feeling. Followed by the comfort of the shoes. This process requires a lot of preparatory work, but most shoe companies in China neglect this point, and think of the basic path-finding process too simply. They just mechanically imitate and plagiarisize shoes, play brand slogans, and then wait. Slow increase in sales. Without a solid foundation, the first result of a brand's entry to the market is often to get stuck in the mud and to make a difficult journey.

Followed by the process of re-education. The precondition for the luxury brand's marketing work at this stage is “having a certain brand awareness”; for the developing brand, the premise is that the channel layout is relatively complete. Allowing consumers to truly experience the uniqueness of the product needs to be based on a wide distribution of channels. The main characteristic of leisure shoes - comfort, should also be at this stage, so that consumers really experience. There is such a case that fully illustrates the importance of the product experience: Once someone admired the ECCO's fame and walked into the store, although the price was too high and he was worried about it, the shoes he tried on his feet were so comfortable that he could not bear it. Take off, and ultimately defeat this comfortable "temptation", and bite your teeth to buy it. As you can imagine, this customer naturally became a loyal customer of ECCO. This is the power of experience! International brands can gain consumers' first experience with their strong reputation and rely on value-added product experience to win long-term patronage. And the “churn out” brand can only win customers’ eyeballs through physical stores and win brand awareness through sales.

The third stage is the process of deep interaction with consumers and market segmentation. Even more high-end products can be surpassed. The only thing that cannot be surpassed is the brand connotation and historical accumulation. Brands entering this stage have very rich product lines and a very stable channel network. At the same time, peer competition is also increasing.

Brands need to earn higher added value. Under the market environment where products follow the trend faster and faster, building the brand's core culture is a must-work for companies, accompanied by market segmentation. A brand cannot be targeted at all categories of consumers, nor can it win the favor of all consumers of a certain category. What companies need to do is to seize a group as much as possible and gradually expand this group.

In short, styles, characteristics, and culture are the three labels of a brand at different stages of development. Only through these three stages can the product truly rise to the brand. The path for each company to build a brand is basically the same, but the progress of time is different. The consolidation of the previous phase may be to save more time for the next phase.