Li Ning: Make the Change

Chinese sports brand Li Ning has unveiled a new logo and slogan as it continues to pursue its global expansion aspirations.

The new slogan Make the Change replaces the previous Anything Is Possible, though the latter phrase is being kept in storage by the company for potential tactical use in the future.

According to the company, the new logo ”displays a modern interpretation of the iconic attributes of the original logo in a modern design language that spells out a global perspective.”

New Li Ning logo

The company has long been criticized for having a logo with too much resemblance to the Nike Swoosh and for a slogan too similar to the Adidas tagline “Impossible Is Nothing.”

Well known in its home market of China for its strong distribution system and competitively priced products, Li Ning has started expanding into numerous overseas markets in Southeast Asia and the USA. It has also begun sponsorship of a handful of western athletes, including a couple of NBA basketball players and European track and field and tennis stars.

The company was founded 20 years ago by Olympian athlete Li Ning, who became an immediate Chinese sporting hero when he captured three Gold Medals in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

As we wrote in this blog back in November (see Li Ning: First Chinese Global Brand? under the categories Branding and Marketing), Li Ning wants to build the first truly global brand to emanate from China.

With this new logo and slogan, he may very well be on track to accomplishing this dream.

Brandkarma — the social network on brands

How do your views of brands stack up with those of others?

Now you can find out — through the Brandkarma web site.

Started by the chief creative officer of one of Australia’s largest ad agencies, Brandkarma is a social media platform “on a mission to help everyone make better brand choices and to influence brand behavior for good.”

The site was founded on two important truths:

1) that in today’s world, brands that span national, social and cultural divides can be a greater force for good than governments, and

2) that we all, as consumers with opinions, have much greater power to influence brand managers and their actions than possibly we currently imagine.

Brandkarma was started to help answer two basic (and important) questions:

1) what kind of world do you want to live in?

2) what kind of a world do you want to leave your kids?

Through this site, all ordinary consumers have a chance to make a difference, assuming Brandkarma grows strong enough to get brand managements to listen.

On the Brandkarma web site, you can comment and score hundreds of brands for any of five criteria: planet, customers, employees, suppliers, or investors.

As Alan Webber, founding editor of Fast Company magazine says in his testimonial on the site, “Let’s all come together around Brandkarma and use it as a platform to help businesses / brands become a force for positive change in the world!”

Enter your own evaluations of brands and join the brand conversations at Brandkarma network today, and let us know what you think. Will this network grow powerful enough to influence the future actions of brands?

Is Brand Loyalty BS?

Brand loyalty is still alive, though declining, at the supermarket according to a survey just conducted by Tim Manners and The Hub Magazine.
Most interestingly, this survey was conducted online with over marketing 200 practitioners, who reported that their loyalty for ten or more brands has dropped in the past year from 61% to 54%.

Over half the 200 respondents claimed that there is such a thing as brand loyalty, even if their own loyalty buying habits have changed in the past year. Another 31% said their loyalties had remained unchanged. Only 9% of these marketing professionals said there was no such thing as brand loyalty.

Surprisingly, the split in loyalty between brands and supermarkets was almost equal, with 45.8% saying they are generally more loyal to the supermarkets where they shopped and 54.2% agreeing they are generally more loyal to the brands they purchased than to the stores where these are bought.

The key factors in supermarket store loyalty would appear to be convenience and seeking savings from sales, based on the comments submitted by a quarter of those who took part in the survey.

Most interestingly, almost two-thirds of the respondents (64%) said that their supermarkets’ loyalty or charge card program did not make them more loyal to the store. In fact, some indicated that these so-called loyalty programs infuriated them and caused them to shop elsewhere.

In terms of category responses, 68% said that they usually purchase more than one breakfast cereal brand and more than one bread brand. What isn’t clear from the responses is whether these purchases are due to the different likes of household family members (which could indicate strong brand loyalty to multiple brands) or if these purchases are a sign of little entrenched brand loyalty in these two categories.

For instance, in my household, we regularly purchase four breakfast cereal brands, due to different taste buds between our adult members and our two teenage boys. However, as we almost always purchase the same four breakfast cereal brands, ours would be a very brand loyal family for this category, albeit across four different brands.

Speaking of brand loyalty, is there such a thing according to these marketing professionals? Not surprisingly, they feel there is. A full 85% responded “no” to the question “is brand loyalty BS.”

However, the current state of play in loyalty may be best summed up by one respondent who wrote regarding brand loyalty:  “for certain brands and categories yes, for the vast majority no.”

Brand loyalty may not be dead, but it is certainly being applied to fewer brands and fewer product categories.

Of the 200+ respondents to this online survey, 30% were from consulting and marketing services firms, 16% from agencies and four percent from media.  The remainder were from manufacturers, the service industry, academia, and a handful of other industries. Over half (55%) of the respondents have more than 15 years in marketing, with another 17% having 10 to 15 years of marketing experience.

A full report of these survey results is promised for the November issue of The Hub Magazine, which will be devoted to the subject of loyalty.

Here’s a questions I hope Tim and his team cover: if marketing professionals, such as the ones in this survey, have declining brand loyalty despite their firm beliefs in the concept of brand loyalty, how can we expect the general consumer and populace to become more brand loyal?

After all, if marketing people do not “walk the talk” about brand loyalty in their own purchasing patterns, do we really expect the general public to listen to our marketing messages and “do as we say, not as we do?”