Lululemon: Reconstructing Brand Value With Community In Post Olympic Era

In 2021, the new year of sports beyond the plan, sports brands create a positive emotional connection between sports and brands with different marketing methods.

Some brands start from sponsoring sports equipment, and strive to integrate their own brand and national spirit during the Olympic Games; There are also brands based on signed star athletes and top sports teams to consolidate their professional brand image.

However, lululemon chose another way to emphasize the feeling of exercise from the perspective of people's well-being in the post epidemic era. According to lululemon, a brand with unique personality, everyone should have the opportunity to feel the positive emotions and positive energy generated by sports.

Recently, lululemon launched a global marketing campaign called feel this feel. This is the largest integrated marketing campaign launched in the world so far, encouraging all people to find their own state of freedom from the dimensions of body, mind and spirit, and feel better about themselves.

　　01 Break the shackles and feel different life with sports

Lululemon's large-scale marketing campaign is inspired by Oscar Wilde's fairy tale the giant's garden to convey the core idea of "breaking the shackles and feeling different". In the global context of the impact of the epidemic, this slogan has a strong purpose.

In early 2021, lululemon released its first global happiness index report, which defined wellbeing from three dimensions: physical, psychological and social relationships. According to the survey, only 29% of respondents in the world said they had a sense of happiness in all three dimensions. Therefore, lululemon launched this marketing campaign, hoping to encourage the public to open up, embrace change, and feel the best of themselves through sports.

As lululemon's key global growth engine, the Chinese market specially invited six stars and ambassadors, including Stephen Marbury and Lu Jingshan, to shoot a series of short creative stories for this marketing campaign. Through the story of characters across different ages, occupations and genders, it highlights the unique feelings and insights that sports bring to people, so as to communicate with consumers, convey lululemon's brand culture and sports philosophy, and arouse more extensive resonance.

These six creative short films are Marbury, actress Lu Jingshan, Alex, a video blogger, Lin Tao, a fitness coach who once climbed Mount Everest, and Alice, a loyal consumer. They show that when their lives encounter difficulties and setbacks, the protagonists can digest them by focusing on their own sports, To find a better self.

From "lone wolf" in NBA to Beijing old horse in CBA, Marbury has been training hard for dozens of hours every day in his basketball career. In his philosophy of life, even if he can't be the best one, he should be one of them. In the era of players, Marbury pursues to constantly surpass his own mental strength. On the one hand, he becomes a top basketball player, but on the other hand, he feels "pressure from basketball".

As his career entered the late stage, Marbury gradually realized that the meaning of basketball for his life was not just for winning and success. The strength of supporting him in his 40s still standing on the court came from his purest love for the sport and the brotherhood between teams. Love is love, this is Marbury's most extreme emotion for basketball.

Marbury's anxiety comes from her own perfectionism, but as an actress, Lu Jingshan's pressure comes from all kinds of scales of modern women. Before this, Lu Jingshan had been commented by netizens as "crus is too thick.". But she directly responded that "it's not that the thinner the legs, the more beautiful they are. Health is the real beauty of women.". In Lu Jingshan's opinion, the healthy posture created by sports is the real beauty, and the mind tempered through sports is the health.

Nowadays, people's pursuit of happiness becomes acute. And sports is a way of life that can bring people endless happiness. Therefore, lululemon is committed to building energy connections in its community, so that consumers in different living conditions can always feel happy and feel their best through sports.

　　02 Innovation, the driving force of lululemon

For lululemon, one of the important reasons why it has developed into a giant company with a market value of more than 55 billion US dollars from yoga is the word "innovation".

In the past 23 years of growth, lululemon, as the pioneer of functional yoga clothing, has established its own school in the field of fabric innovation. Smooth nulu with good elasticity ™、 Lightweight and flexible nulux ™、 Soft and comfortable Loon ®、 Luxtreme with low resistance and stronger encapsulation ® And other fabric technologies are lululemon's unique "science of feel".

These technological and application innovations not only ensure that users can absorb sweat and breathe freely during wearing, but also can solve the problem of covering when the limbs are stretched. As a result, the positive feedback brought by sports equipment can enhance users' confidence in participating in sports and pure love for the sport.

With the continuous progress of R & D technology, lululemon covers more and more products and categories to cover more diverse sports scenes and daily life.

As for lululemon, although it started from yoga, it was favored by female consumers. But the company's future development strategy is not limited to yoga sports equipment and female consumers. In recent years, lululemon's new product development has paid more attention to the consumption demand of male sports groups.

As a sports brand "inspired by healthy lifestyle", lululemon is gradually opening up the road of product innovation, expanding products including running, training, daily commuting, etc. Specifically, lululemon, together with top surfer mark Healey, launched the limited edition moon drive series in June this year to provide surfers with comfortable sailing equipment.

According to foreign media reports, lululemon will also launch footwear products in 2022 to meet the needs of important market segments.

　　03 Reconstruction of brand value with community in post Olympic Era

Under the epidemic situation, the empty Tokyo Olympic Games not only did not cover up the light of the Olympic flame, but let more people feel the value of sports and the significance of participating in sports. Before that, the output of the view of "the Olympic Games has corrected my aesthetics" from domestic social media platforms has aroused the thinking and heated discussion of the whole society. What is reflected behind this is the important role of sports in deepening life and changing the breadth of everyone's life.

In addition, during the Tokyo Olympic Games, the State Council issued the new policy of "National Fitness Program (2021-2025)", which made a new deployment to promote the development of national fitness at a higher level and better meet the people's fitness and health needs. Starting from arousing the enthusiasm of the masses, the state Council helped them change their lives, strengthen their bodies and inspire their spirits. Lululemon, who has been advocating the "sweat life" culture, is in line with the construction of sports culture and the popularization of sports in China.

Different from the traditional sports goods, lululemon realizes that most sports people are worried about not what style and function of equipment they choose, but how to better participate in sports, gain self-confidence in sports, and learn to talk with themselves. Therefore, lululemon determined its mode of community construction and development mode of increasing community operation at the beginning of entering the Chinese market.

The more than 50 lululemon stores in China are not only a display window for products, but also a gathering place for like-minded sports enthusiasts. Regular dance, HIIT yoga, Pilates and other activities are held regularly to convey the brand's unique "sweet life" hot sweat lifestyle to consumers, which is the community culture that lululemon establishes and develops based on its stores.

At the same time, lululemon also extends the concept of community to large-scale offline activities. Regular off-line events in cities, yoga activities for 100 people in Shanghai, beach parties for hot sweats in Shenzhen and other interactive activities show that community culture can effectively promote the popularization and promotion of national fitness from one person, to a group of people, and then to all people. This is of far-reaching significance for lululemon's market expansion and the development of China's sports industry.

A Chinese consumer once described the changes in life after contact with lululemon. "Those people with facial features that may not be considered beautiful in this secular aesthetics have beautiful souls with self-confidence, laughter and crazy love of life. They have boundlessly infected me and given me a lot of self-confidence and love. The views I cared about before are no longer taken seriously."

In the Olympic arena, we have witnessed the touching moment when countless athletes dare to challenge themselves and break through the limit. The reason why sports can cross the barriers of region, culture and language and wave the heartstrings of everyone is precisely because the spirit and courage it represents can be projected in our ordinary life, making people become optimistic, brave and strong. And this kind of pure and simple power needs to be passed on to more people with the help of brands like lululemon.