I pondered Sheng Ya's brief, and fell into deep thought.

When a brand reaches its 19th year and suddenly wants to engage in rejuvenation, it is actually a "self-harming" thing.

I'll tell you a story.

In 2012, I participated in a Li-Ning competition.

Before 2010, Li Ning had unlimited scenery in the Chinese mainland sports brand market.

According to the China online shopping market monitoring report of Sibo Consulting, in the online shopping market of sports shoes in Q3 (the third quarter) of 2010, Li Ning eliminated Adidas with a market share of 25.9%, approaching Nike and becoming the second largest sports brand.

In 2009, Li Ning's revenue reached 8.3 billion yuan, and the company's net profit was 940 million yuan.

All of this is with the help of the success of the Beijing Olympic Games, the rise of national pride, and the success of the market by virtue of its own product design close to Chinese elements, more advantageous prices and excellent product quality than foreign first-line brands - the so-called "time, place, and people".

In 2009, there were more than 7,200 offline stores in China.

Li Ning, who dared to be the first in the world, did not rest on its laurels while gaining market recognition, and at that time Li Ning realized that its brand would soon face the trend of aging consumer groups in the future.

So in 2010, they put forward the slogan of "post-90s Li Ning" and began the first phase of the rebranding plan.

Founded in 1990, it is not too much to say that it is a "post-90s" generation.

Around 2010, it is also an indisputable fact that the main consumer force of the sporting goods market is gradually moving closer to the post-90s.

"Post-90s Li-Ning" is more like a repositioning of an old brand.

Rank, speaking of which, by now, you may feel that Li Ning has done all this correctly.

But what about the result?

In 2011, Li Ning's net profit was 368 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 65.19%.

In 2012, Li Ning's net profit loss reached nearly 2 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 612.97%.

Indeed, the rise of e-commerce channels has had a part of the impact on offline terminal retail.

But at that time, we believed that there was still a part of the source of the disease due to the "misalignment" of brand positioning.

Through market research, it was found that the main age group of Li Ning products was over 30 years old at that time.

The "post-90s Li Ning" made the main consumer at that time have a brand identity deviation.

Especially in that era when the "post-90s" generation was linked to negative labels such as "brain-dead", "non-mainstream", "doing my own thing" and even "dick".

But in real life, the post-90s generation will not buy it because of what the brand thinks they are - in their hearts, Li Ning is still worn by their uncle and parents.

Li Ning hurt the existing market and also lost the target customer group.

At that time, the brief of the draft was to hope that there would be an agency specializing in marketing that could help Li Ning take the right path of rejuvenating the brand.

I was in Beijing that year, Linda took me, and James was the overall project leader and the owner of the office.

Day and night we had meetings, brainstormed, worked overtime, shuttled back and forth between major universities, and received handsome rewards in exchange for students filling out a questionnaire.

When we dug into the ancestral grave, we were about to think of the insight of the post-90s generation.

How should Li Ning get younger?

At that time, a senior copywriter inadvertently said a sentence, and it turned out to be to the point.

He said at the time that Li Ning instead of spending a high amount of money to hire an advertising company to do research and think of ideas, and then signing entertainment and sports stars to shoot large-scale advertising films, and then spending high media costs to carry out 360-degree bombardment (meaning that traditional media including TV stations, newspapers and magazines, radio stations, outdoor billboards, as well as major web portals, mini stations, post bar forums, blogs, microblogs and other SNS platforms are all launched) are not as good as tabloid reporters unintentionally photographing Lady Gaga wearing a pair of Li Ning when shopping.

At that time, people were not familiar with terms such as "traffic" and "bringing goods", but the role that these terms actually played between market behavior and sales results had already begun to subvert the traditional business model.

In 2018, Li Ning appeared on the "China Day" of New York Fashion Week, revitalizing its majesty and raising its eyebrows with a new attitude of "China Li Ning".

The "Enlightenment" series of "China Li Ning" not only favors today's post-90s, but also makes many post-00s marvel because they "can't grab it" on the Internet.

After 9 years of walking, Li Ning really entered the hearts of Chinese young people.

Young people don't think you're young just because you feel young.

Imagine an uncle in his 50s who uses station b or Douyin to talk to college students today, will college students think that this uncle is very trendy and young?

I don't think so.

On the contrary, young people will feel that this stalk is "outdated" and will not play anymore.

But if you think about it, James Jebbia (founder of Supreme) and Hiroshi Fujiwara are both nearly 60 people, Nigo is almost 50, and even Edison Chen will be 40 years old soon.

These "uncles" not only do not make you feel "outdated", but are still leading the trend of today's young people.

So, don't clumsily imitate young people, don't put some so-called "labels" on them in order to get close to them, and then use these labels as the intersection between you and them to prove that you are young.

Even if you say "young people refuse to be labeled", it is a "label".

What young people really need is not a sense of belonging and identity, they are young because they need to be led.

So the best way to make yourself young is to do something really cool – like read a lot of books and watch movies like Hideo Kojima, and then share some of your own speculative ideas, even if you learn to draw, and express your attitude like Kaws.

If you are a person, so is you a brand.