The Empirical Research On Brand Positioning Of Sports Goods Based On Consumers' Perception

Chinese sports goods have a numerous production and a large scale which theproportion is very high in the world. In1980s, sports goods enterprises mainly depended onOEM processing. Since the early1990s, the Asian financial crisis had influenced theeconomic development level, which depressed the sports goods enterprise benefit and theexport sales showed a trend of decline. In the late1990s, the well-known internationalbrands, such as Adidas, Nike, entered into the domestic market, which threatens to theChinese sporting goods market. Therefore, the home brands such like li-Ning, Anta mustface to double attack of domestic and foreign brands. By this time, the importance of brandpositioning is prominent. Due to the difficulty of accuracy on brand positioning for manyenterprises, this article intends to take sports goods enterprises as the research object andconsiders consumer perception as the research origin, in order to study different brandpositioning strategies on how to influence consumer purchase decisions which can helpsports goods enterprises become more accurate in direction and clearer in consideration forformulating strategies of brand positioning and marketing. In this article, the following twoaspects are mainly proposed: on the one hand, by means of the empirical research results,sports goods enterprises could understand psychology of consumers and deeply find the gapbetween the brand and consumer demand, which can timely provide the basis forenterprises to find the accurate direction of the brand positioning, so as to formulateappropriate and accurate brand positioning. On the other hand, based on empiricalcomparison research on five representative sports brands in domestic and foreign, the gapbetween domestic leading brands and international well-known brands can be seen. At thesame time, the strengths and weakness can also be found for the domestic cheap brands inorder to know defects of brand positioning. Therefore, the more effective marketingstrategies for different levels of brand in sports goods can be formulated.Taking sporting goods brand as the research object and from the point of view of theconsumer perception, the whole research idea of this article is divided into six parts. Thefirst part mainly shows the research background, research objective and importance of thisarticle, as well as innovations, research methods and research framework. The second partproposes theories in domestic and foreign which includes consumer perception,segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP), brand positioning and brand image. Thenthis article emphasizes on the core that brand positioning is brand image shaping based onconsumer perception, which the premise is market segmentation of enterprises. Thus, theidea of brand positioning for sporting goods is explicit. Through the analysis of thedeveloping way, the production mode, the developing prospects and the status quo of brand positioning for sports goods enterprises, the third part explores the factors affectingconsumer perception of positioning, which include product, price, service, brand image,access to information, social attribute, etc.. The fourth part is the empirical research. First ofall, according to the brand positioning factors specified in the third part, this part tries togive an original test through questionnaires to select the typical positioning elements. Thenthe research hypothesis is proposed: the different positioning strategies of Sports goodsenterprises would make consumer perception different. After that, this part conducts aformal market investigation for the five brands which are Adidas, Nike, Li-Ning, Anta andHongxing. Then, this part achieves information and data by using descriptive statisticsanalysis, and verifies the above hypothesis by using the factor analysis of SPSS software toprocess market research data. In the fifth part, this article applies the data from theempirical analysis to the typical domestic sports goods enterprises in order to put forwardmarketing strategy for different levels of domestic sports goods brands. For example, thetop domestic sports goods enterprises must regard Adidas, Nike as benchmarkingenterprises, especially improving their product specialization, brand popularity andindividuality, to extend overseas markets faster and occupy the domestic market sharegreater. In addition, the low domestic sports goods brands must enhance their brand imageand product quality. The last part in this article gives the enlightenment from the empiricalresults: domestic sports goods enterprises should go to the top of the market pattern, take upa certain amount of market share, must improve product quality, value brand image,enhance social property of products and promote service quality.