How to Revive a Brand (Part II of II)
Every brand has an expiration date. Marketing isn’t the only way to revive it. [Part II of II]
Welcome to the Intersection. In my last essay, “How to Revive a Brand (Part I of II),” I talk about the shared past between two brands, Nike and ASICS, that resulted in divergent fortunes. In Part II, I share the background story of how ASICS is making a comeback in recent years.
The first running shoe
I begged my mom to buy me a pair of running shoes. I wasn’t even a teenager yet.
I had seen them in a magazine. It was the lightest running shoe to ever be invented by any company at the time. Each shoe weighed 100 grams, the weight of two eggs. At the tender age of eleven, I understood why the product was innovative. Also, I was attracted to the shoe’s design. It had a blue and white top with orange ASICS stripes. It had an iconic look.
I would bring them to school in the accompanying shoe bag. Before one running race, I remember taking them out of the bag, trying to pretend to be subtle but making sure others could see me. I couldn’t wear them that long as I grew out of the shoe size in less than a year.
However, If I were honest, that may have been the last time that I lusted after ASICS products.
Michael Jordan had become a global phenomenon by the late 1980s and early 1990s and so had Nike, ASICS’ offspring.
I kept those shoes somewhere in our shoe closet but over time, I lost track of them. Perhaps, my brand allegiance to ASICS started to drift away. For nostalgia’s sake, though, I would later search for them online but without remembering the name of the product, I didn’t have much luck.
Until I started working with ASICS three decades later.
Adjacent to the headquarters of ASICS in Kobe, Japan, is a modest building that houses The ASICS Sports Museum. It showcases generations of products, mainly footwear, starting from 1949. For almost every year since then, the brand has introduced various types of innovation to its product line-up and has helped numerous athletes compete on the world stage.
There are shoes worn by Ichiro, the Hall-of-Fame baseball outfielder, and the plaster cast of one of his feet, or those worn by Novak Djokovic, the current No. 1 tennis player in the world, and by historical athletes such as Lasse Virén, a legendary Finnish long-distance runner. Following his 10,000 meters final win at the 1976 Montreal games, Virén took off his Onitsuka Tiger Runspark shoes, waved them to the crowd on his victory lap, and was almost suspended by the IOC for violating its rules for not using the event as a platform for promoting a brand.
Among a few hundred products on display, I caught a shoe in the corner of my eye, quietly tucked away on one shelf of a display box. “Sortie UL 100, 1986” read the display tag. The shoe that I tried to track down online years later but was never able to.
It took a pilgrimage to a medium-sized city in Japan famous for its namesake beef to rediscover my childhood object of desire.
Humility
The museum is a tapestry of ASICS's product achievements over the years.
It’s also classically a Japanese exhibit of humility.
For a company that has contributed to the world of sports as much as ASICS has and that gave Nike its start, this museum is humble and understated. The entire exhibit would fit into a lobby of one of the buildings at Nike HQ.
In Japanese culture, humility is taught as one of the core virtues that we should adhere to as individuals. Talking about ourselves is discouraged because we’d be seen as self-centered. To be humble is an act of moral beauty, as the Japanese teaching goes.
And this virtue is at the crux of Japanese culture. It has served society in Japan well in that it’s one of the reasons why the crime rate in Japan is so low. There is an inherent respect for others almost at the sacrifice of the individual self.
This sense of humility, in my opinion, has been a detriment for many Japanese brands on the international stage, including ASICS. Marketing is about, at least partially, people and brands talking, boosting, and even bragging about themselves.
It's antithetical to Japanese culture.
But is marketing to blame?
In the five-year span from 2015 to 2020, ASICS’s revenue shrunk from $3.7 billion to $3.1 billion.
However, since 2021, the brand has managed to do a turnaround and has added a billion dollars to its topline. Its revenue in 2023 was at $4.01 billion, an increase of over 29% in a few years and the highest in its corporate history.
I started working with Mr. Yasuhito Hirota, the architect of the turnaround, in 2019, a year after he joined ASICS as Chief Operating Officer. He was recruited by Mr. Motoi Oyama, ASICS’s former CEO and the son-in-law of Kihachiro Onitsuka, the founder of ASICS. As Mr. Oyama has retired in 2021, Mr. Hirota has been elevated to the CEO.
When we started working with ASICS, they knew the brand was in trouble. In 2018, the company lost 20 billion yen, or $175 million, per its annual report.
At that time, ASICS’s ask to us was simple but broad: “Can you help us with our marketing?” I’m paraphrasing here but that was the gist of their ask and to be fair, I thought that would be how we should and could help them.
Marketing is an easy function to blame when sales are lagging.
The core of a brand
As part of my pilgrimage to ASICS HQ, I got to visit The Institute of Sport Science, the company’s R&D facility in the hills outside of Kobe in Japan.
I have been to several R&D labs of famous corporations throughout my career. ASICS’s lab, like its museum, is unassuming. It only took one visit, however, for me to realize that what gets tested and developed inside the lab not only rivals but exceeds many of its competitors in its depth, thoroughness, and innovation that helps athletes.
For instance, many footwear brands source materials from external vendors to make shoes. The Institute at ASICS, on the other hand, has material scientists on staff who test and invent new materials for their products from scratch. Their devotion is dedicated to not only helping athletes perform better but also caring and protecting them from getting injured.
What became clear to me during the visit as well as through various conversations with executives and employees at ASICS is that ASICS puts as much emphasis on the longevity of the athlete as on the victory by the athlete.
Turns out, this ethos is spelled out in both cases for Nike and ASICS.
The word “Nike,” as widely known, means the goddess of victory in Greek mythology. ASICS—and it’s not well known—stands for “Anima Sana In Corpore Sano,” a Latin expression meaning “A sound mind in a sound body.” ASICS is an acronym of this phrase. It’s quite creative.
They are both sports brands but their hearts are in different places. One is unabashedly American and the other, quintessentially Japanese.
It wasn’t marketing after all
Given the level of R&D that ASICS has been doing for years, it was perplexing that these innovative aspects of the company weren’t well-known outside of the brand.
Having worked with many business leaders across different industries, the first step is to look at the challenge the company faces not just from one angle, i.e. marketing or branding, but from multiple angles and decide what to tackle.
Over the course of five years and among many initiatives we worked on with ASICS, it was these four core initiatives, among many, born out of simple questions that I believe contributed to ASICS’ business in fundamental ways.
Common Language: “What do we stand for as a brand?”
Product Innovation: “What unique benefit can we deliver to our audience?”
Customer Experience: “What are the frictions we can remove for our customers?”
Corporate Strategy: “What’s our vision towards 2030?”
1. Common Language: “The lifetime athlete in all of us”
After having spent some time working with ASICS, we noticed subtle but enough inconsistencies in the language they would use to talk about themselves and their audience. When asked the same question, say, “What does the brand stand for?” executives and employees would have similar but different answers. Everyone had their opinion.
This issue became further exasperated when talking to international employees.
This wasn’t a brief. We merely observed this subtle inconsistency. After we got to know a few senior folks at ASICS, we coined and proposed the phrase “The lifetime athlete in all of us” as a way for ASICS to think of its audience.
We also wrote an interpreted version of this in Japanese. I emphasize “interpreted” instead of “translated” here because a translated version of this phrase sounds a little unnatural.
Just last week, I was in a meeting with another client who, by coincidence, happened to have had a meeting with one of the senior sports scientists from the aforementioned ASICS Institute of Sport Science. My client said that the scientist from ASICS used this exact phrase at that meeting. That’s how much a simple phrase can permeate through employees of an organization and give clarity on why they do what they do.
2. Product Innovation: Beyond 2020 Workshops
“You can put this into a microwave and it’ll turn into the outsole of a shoe!”
A product engineer at ASICS told me with excitement. He handed me a blob made of a rubber-like material, several centimeters/a couple of inches in diameter.
My initial reaction was “Oh, that’s kind of cool,” quickly followed by “But who would want to microwave a shoe?” Other than the possible efficiency this technology could introduce to the manufacturing process, it didn’t propose any tangible consumer benefit. It was a classic case of technology in search of a problem.
This led to “Beyond 2020,” a series of workshops that we proposed, organized, and facilitated for a cross-functional group of individuals at ASICS that included sports scientists, designers, merchandisers, marketers, and sales associates.
The aim was to get employees from different disciplines to work together much earlier in the process so that technology is being developed for the sake of, not technology, but the customer.
3. Customer Experience: OneASICS Membership Program
As we started working with ASICS, we would sign up for various services. Before long, one of my team members jokingly said that she had a dozen different login credentials to access various ASICS sites and services. She wasn’t joking.
If it was this fragmented for someone who worked with ASICS to log into its services, it would be so much worse for anyone outside of the organization, i.e. customers. We knew right away that this was a nut to crack.
We conceived and designed OneASICS, the brand’s first global, direct-to-consumer membership program. It would sit at the core of multiple customer touch points, creating a more connected view of its customers.
In 2018, the first year we launched the program, it gained 700k members. Five years later in 2023, it grew tenfold, resulting in more than 8.3M members around the world for ASICS.
4. Corporate Strategy: Vision 2030
In 2020, ASICS had the worst financial result in its recent history.
That was when our working relationship with ASICS, and specifically with Mr. Hirota, then the COO (now CEO) of ASICS, got even closer. As a publicly traded company, ASICS would have earning calls and investor meetings. The fall of 2020 was when he needed to present to the investors the company’s 10-year vision. We were asked to help with crafting the presentation.
Traditionally at ASICS—and most companies, particularly—these investor presentations could be full of tactical charts, tables, and bullet points. They were as corporate, and even dull, as they could be. In addition, when numbers are bad, the MO for most companies is to be in the cost-cutting mode. They are quick to look for tactical things, i.e. performance marketing, that can yield immediate results.
Instead, we worked with Mr. Hirota and his corporate strategy, product, engineering, and marketing teams to craft a long-term narrative for ASICS, in the form of visual stories and tangible examples.
Even though this was a complete deviation from the traditional way of presenting to the investors, it was received with much enthusiasm. The equally eager reception, to my surprise, came from the employees of ASICS around the world. Many said that it was the first time they understood where the company was headed and what they needed to do to get there.
When humility pays off
At the Investment Day presentation in June 2021, Mr. Hirota shared a humbling story: during Japan's most famous collegiate running race in January of that year, the Hakone Ekiden, not a single runner wore ASICS shoes.
18 months prior, he had directed his organization to form a special unit called the C Project. It was a cross-functional team that included young members from the Institute of Sport Science, Marketing, Product Development, Manufacturing, and Legal & IP departments, akin to the formation of teams at the Beyond 2020 Workshops a few years earlier.
Mr. Hirota, COO at the time, had this C Project team report to him directly in order to remove layers for better communication and a faster decision-making process. This resulted in the development of two new models of running footwear in a relatively short amount of time, METASPEED™ Edge and METASPEED™ Sky, based on the data and insight that different runners needed different solutions.
In January of 2024, three years after the humiliating no-show of ASICS shoes at the said running race, 24.8% of runners wore ASICS shoes. These footwear models have now become a massive business driver for ASICS.
While we had a part in supporting ASICS through the tough years with the initiatives described above, it is not only Mr. Hirota’s leadership but also his and his team’s humility that put them on the path toward growth. They deserve the credit for the turnaround of the brand.
30 years from now, these shoes will be for sure on display at the ASICS Sports Museum.
And by then, in a new, bigger, and flashier building, perhaps.
Thanks for reading. This one took a while to write. Thanks for your patience.
Please hit reply with any feedback, thoughts, or questions. I’d love to hear from you.
This was fascinating.
Fantastic!!