New Balance Brand Audit

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Market segment

Due to New Balance brand characters, the market segment of New Balance is aimed at consumers’ age.

- 10-20-year-old adolescents, who have not very high consumption ability;

- 20-30-year-old young people, who are both youthful and not stable young;

- 30-40-year-old relatively stable middle-aged, who focus on healthy and comfortable.

- 40-50-year-old crows, who have high requirements of the product cost-effective.

Target market

[pic 3]The figure demonstrates that 20-40-year-old consumers will be the main customer base of New Balance. For this reason, the target market of New Balance could be the adults who hhave a certain request for shoes comfort. In another word, this part of customers converts their attention from the appearance of shoes to shoes comfort and foot protection, they also have high purchasing ability.

Brand positioning

On the one hand, New Balance is mainly for consumer group from 30-40 years old, it launched a series of enhanced comfort and simple shoes, like Jogging Wind series. Because of its unique positioning, there is no competition among other sportswear brand. On the other hand, young people who like pop culture is also a positioning group. New Balance introduced a diversified, multi-element, multi-color combination elements, like Retro Style series. Although the products of New Balance are not plentiful like Nike and Adidas, "New Balance products cate for the trend of young people". Compared with Adidas and Nike's all-round development model, the segment market of New Balance was running shoes. With the popularity of running sports, New Balance grasp the changes in consumer trends effectively.

SWOT analysis of New Balance

Strength:

- New Balance is an American brand which has more than 100 years of history. Compared with other young brands, New Balance has a more profound brand connotation.

- New Balance devote itself to shoe-making process. Due to certain technical experience of jogging shoes, is committed to high-tech functional materials research and development,

- Popular shoes customized. The same length of shoes and height and width of the difference, allowing consumers to freely choose depending on their own feet.

Weakness:

- New Balance officially entered into the Chinese market in 2003. Compared with Adidas, and Nike, it was late for more than 10 years.

- Marketing is too low-key, which is not conducive to launch new markets. It has been to follow fuzzy celebrity endorsement principles, so New Balance is far away from the other leading brands in the top of the market.

- New Balance as a sports brand, paid much attention to footwear products, ignoring apparel.

Opportunities:

- There are still less outlets in the domestic market, some provinces and cities are even blank. Therefore, it is great potential for New Balance to explore more market opportunities. (Market)

- New Balance cooperated with South Korea brand E-LAND. It could attract more Asian customers attention. (Customers)

Threats:

- Leading sports brand market share is huge, such as Nike. (Market)

- Intellectual property protection is ineffective, piracy and counterfeiting are still serious.

- Consumers are not easy to accept high prices of New Balance. (Customer)