Analysis of Instagram Media Marketing Strategy of Li-Ning Based on 4I Theory ()
1. Introduction
The internationalization of Chinese Li-Ning can be traced back to 1999, when Li-Ning established the International Trade Department. In order to establish an international brand image and enhance brand awareness, Li-Ning has never stopped the pace of internationalization. The pace of internationalization of overseas social media marketing is a very important part, Li-Ning in overseas social media marketing covers the whole platform including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tiktok. These social media platforms have a large user group. Li-Ning in 2022 in overseas social media marketing in instagram marketing coverage reached 9.52%, which is a big achievement. (Data source: “Overseas Social Media Marketing Trend News of Sports Shoes and Clothing Brands”). But it also has larger progress space. With the continuous development of The Times, Marketing theory is also accelerating the pace of development. In order to adapt to the Internet and the digital age, the proposal of 4I theory involving communication effect provides a new dimension to improve the marketing effect. Therefore, this paper analyzes the marketing effect of Li-Ning in Instagram from some social media data indicators, and puts forward corresponding problems and constructs Instagram marketing strategies based on 4I theory.
In terms of studying the effect of social media marketing, “The Digital Video Effect Evaluation of Social Media Marketing” (Wang & Guo, 2022) literally stated the value and effect of digital video marketing evaluation. They raised some important indicators to measure the effect of marketing, including broadcast indicators and transformation related indicators. For example, powder increase rate, broadcast rate, comments and social sharing; “Wechat Marketing Effect Evaluation Research of Jinshanling Great Wall Scenic Spot” (Yuan, 2023) constructed the evaluation index system through data method and conducted weight analysis. Calculating the relevant indicators to obtain the marketing effect evaluation. It further analyzed the related problems and the causes. Finally, the relevant improvement suggestions are put forward.
From the research of social media marketing, “Research on Cross-border E-commerce FACEBOOK Overseas Social Media Marketing Strategy-Take R Company as an example” (Zheng, 2020) analyzed the internal and external conditions of social media marketing of the research object, took the form of questionnaire survey to establish a model to investigate Facebook consumers, finally put forward the feasibility of marketing strategy; “Based on Overseas Mainstream Social Sedia Platform Li-Ning Brand Advertising Researce” (Liu, 2022) introduced Li-Ning brand course, Li-Ning in overseas social media advertising content detailed analysis including advertising theme, advertising category, appeal. It used 4I theory and questionnaire form analyzing Li-Ning in the spread of overseas social media status and effect, especially in which through the comparison with competitors Nike, finally providing related improvement measures.
From the research aspects of 4I marketing theory, “The Optimization of 4I Marketing Strategy of a Newspaper in New Media Era” (Hu, 2023) used PEST and SWOT methods to analyze the living environment of a newspaper, and made an introduction of the 4I theory. Putting forward the existing problems and reasons of marketing based on 4I theory; “Chinese Overseas Brand Shein Instagram Account Content Marketing Strategy Analysis” (Ren, 2022) based on the principle of 4I through the content analysis method from 4I four dimensions of Interesting, Interests, Interaction and Individuality, researched the current Shein brand overseas marketing strategy. They believe that Shein’s sailing has inspired other Chinese brands to go overseas and has some common problems.
Most scholars have optimized the strategy of the 4I theory of the research objects. The existing literature combines brand research with overseas social media marketing, while the results of Li-Ning brand in Instagram marketing are few, and on this basis, there is no literature using the 4I theory to analyze marketing strategy. This paper fills in the research gap in this aspect.
The structure of this paper is as follows: Firstly, this paper analyzes the main overseas social media and the performance of Li-Ning in various overseas social media, and explains why Li-Ning’s Instagram marketing is chosen as the research object; secondly, this paper uses the six indicators to comprehensively analyze the marketing effect of Li-Ning in Instagram; then it presents corresponding questions based on the 4I theory and the marketing effect of Li-Ning; finally, this paper provides the optimization strategy of overseas social media marketing.
2. Methodology
The data used in this paper comes from my network platform observation research and second-hand data collection, in terms of indicators after effective screening using the six measures of marketing effect, through quantitative research, with research data calculation related indicators and network second-hand data sorting li ning existing problems in Instagram marketing.
3. Li-Ning Overseas Social Media Marketing Platforms Comparison
3.1. Overseas Social Medias Comparison
Overseas mainstream social medias include five platforms-Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Tiktok, and they have their own uniqueness in operation mode and page design. Most Chinese overseas brands almost cover the above mainstream platforms in overseas social media marketing. Table 1 lists the comparison of the mainstream social media platforms. The Instagram platform analyzed in this paper is the fourth most popular social media in the world. With 2 billion monthly active users, the distribution of male and female users is more balanced. They spend an average of 11.7 hours per month on Instagram. And Instagram is the largest social media platform for brands to build connections. On average, fans of business accounts grew 0.98% monthly. And for users, Instagram is one of the most favorite social media platforms for Gen Z. It has a higher value of the average user interaction consumption amount than the Facebook; Facebook is the world’s largest social media outlet, With 2.91 billion monthly active users, male and female users accounted for a higher proportion of men. Global users spend an average of 20 hours a month on Facebook; Twitter is the seventh most popular social media platform worldwide. Less monthly active users than on other platforms, 62.9% of the Twitter users were male. Twitter owns the largest gender gap across all social platforms. It is the most popular social platform for news and current affairs, 76% of users said they bought things based on Twitter conversations. But only 43% of marketers
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Table 1. Comparison of overseas mainstream social medias platforms.
Date source: “The 2023 Social Media Marketing Trends Report”.
promote their business on Twitter; Youtube is the world’s second-largest social media platform and the second-largest search engine after Google. Global users spend an average of 23.7 hours per month. The ads covered 2.56 billion users. 70 percent of viewers buy commodities after seeing their brands on YouTube; Tiktok, with over 1 billion monthly active users, is the world’s largest downloaded and the sixth largest social platform in the world. It’s more popular than Instagram among American Gen Z users. Eight new users join TikTok per second. An average of 650,000 new users join every day.
3.2. Li-Ning’s Marketing Performance in Various Social Medias
Li-Ning has laid out six platforms in overseas media marketing, and carried out many attempts of cross-border and co-branded marketing. And the layout weight is different in different platforms. As can be seen from Figure 1, Li-Ning had the highest coverage rate in Facebook, reaching 28.57%. It has 130,000 followers on Facebook, mainly by publishing a lot of Picture Post and Video Post for content promotion, but interactive performance is flat; LinkedIn and YouTube ranked second only to facebook. The coverage rate reached 23.81%. LinkedIn is unlike with other social media platforms in many ways. It is used to layout overseas local teams and facing the company’s B-end customers rather than C-end consumers. Li-Ning has performed well in Youtube video marketing, especially in the Internet celebrity marketing owning a lot of high-quality video output; Instagramranks third with Twitter. Instagram content publishing mainly through Post and Story, in particular, the picture proportion is relatively high. And Instagram is better than Facebook in terms of interactivity. Li-Ning built the global page on the Twitter highlighting the brand spirit and weaking the product. And the content spreads faster than other platforms; Li-Ning’s coverage rate in Tiktok is still low, but the potential in the Tiktok is huge. Because most
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Figure 1. Li-Ning overseas social media platforms marketing coverage rate. Data source: “Overseas Social Media Marketing Trend News of Sports Shoes and Clothing Brands”.
users are young people in age Z, who are more interactive. This paper considers the performance of Li-Ning in Instagram and puts forward its problems, on the one hand, because Instagram is the largest social platform for brand connection, Li-Ning has a certain fan base on Instagram platform. The interaction is better than other social media platforms and the overall marketing effect is well; on the other hand, Li-Ning exists some questions in Instagram content, form of marketing page building and interaction. So there is great room for its improvement.
4. Li-Ning Overseas Market Instagram Marketing Effect Analysis
In 2017, Li-Ning began to target Instagram, the first social media platform to connect with the brand. Instagram is the fourth popular social media in the world and one of the most favorite social media in the Z era. Since Li-Ning started its account on Instagram, it has focused on the global page operation, combined with Web3 and held female campaign. Most of the marketing content is presented in pictures, including celebrity endorsement, sports events, product series release, these marketing ways have different marketing effect. This paper will analyze the marketing effect of Chinese Li-Ning in Instagram from six indicators: brand awareness, content participation, user growth rate, average participation rate, click-through rate and Instagram participation rate in the same industry.
4.1. Brand Awareness
Brand recognition is a measure of the user group attention and understanding the brand. It reflects whether the brand is effectively linked to the user or the potential consumer. One of the best metrics of brand awareness is the number of times of brand mentioned. Because Instagram does not have a good indicator to measure brand recognition, this paper uses Google Trend to study Li-Ning’s global brand recognition. According to Figure 2, from 2018 to 2021, Li-Ning has a relatively stable heat in the international market. Since the year of 2022,
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Figure 2. China’s Li-Ning in the global heat change trend of the past five years. Data source: Google Trends.
Li-Ning’s heat began to gradually rise. Generally speaking, Li-Ning’s brand recognition is getting higher and higher; in terms of search volume (Table 2), Li-Ning’s celebrity spokesmen, activity theme and badminton products are on the rise. It can be seen that Li-Ning’s global brand recognition is mainly driven by these aspects; the search hot area (Table 3) shows the high search volume in Asia, especially in Southeast Asia. Low searches exist in European and American countries. It can be seen that Li-Ning has obvious regional differences in the international recognition, Brand awareness in European and American countries still needs to be improved. Therefore, Li-Ning’s marketing effect in brand cognition has improved greatly, but the geographical distribution of the audience is not balanced.
4.2. Content Engagement
Li-Ning’s user engagement is low, and there is still room for a rise. Content engagement is an index that how many people engage marketing content after it is posted on social media. This is a very important indicator, which can measure the enthusiasm of the audience of Li-Ning related marketing content. For Instagram platforms, a wide variety of tags can be used to measure this metric. Figure 3 shows Li-Ning’s hot tags on Instagram and the number of their posts. As you can see, the most popular one is #lining, with 593,000 posts. It has higher consumer participation rate, because it goes directly to the brand name. Consumers will almost certainly use this label when releasing content related to the Li-Ning brand. In second place was the #liningbadminton with 50,000 Posts. This can also show that Li-Ningof the international badminton products are more outstanding. Most buyers of Li-Ning products are concentrated in this product line. In third place is the #liningindonesia, it can be seen that Li-Ning has more consumers in Indonesia. Local buyers are also highly motivated to participate in the Instagram, #liningsecond indicates that Li-Ning second-hand market has penetrated online and has a large scale, trading of related commodities through the Instagram channels. The fifth and sixth label also shows that Li-Ning’s other popular range in overseas markets is basketball shoes.
4.3. User Growth Rate
From this index, Li-Ning’s overseas awareness is indeed gradually improving,
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Table 2. Search volume of Li-Ning related topics.
Data source: Google Trends.
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Table 3. Li-Ning in the global regional heat.
Data source: Google Trends.
and overseas potential consumer groups are expanding. This measure measures how quickly a brand gets new fans over a period of time. Li-Ning has had 303,000 followers since March 1, 2017. This paper selects three time nodes to calculate the user growth rate of Li-Ning in two time periods. The user growth rate is calculated by dividing the number of new fans by the number of fans in
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Figure 3. Number of posts tagged (unit: ten thousand). Data source: Instagram.
the previous stage and multiplying by 100. According to the data of Figure 4, from December 31, 2021 to June 30, 2022, the user growth rate of this period for more than a year was (24.99 - 23.8)/23.8 * 100 = 5%, while from June 30, 2022 to 15 October 2023, the user growth rate of the past year was (30.3 - 24.99)/24.99 * 10.0 = 21.25%. Visible, Li-Ning in the recent user growth rate is better than the previous stage.
4.4. Average Participation Rate
Li-Ning has a good value of the average participation rate of fans, but the distribution is not concentrated. The fan participation has an obvious preference of marketing content, and the gap between the number of likes and the number of comments is obvious. The average participation rate is the percentage of fans who interact with the marketing content. This indicator can reflect the interaction degree of the brand audience and the marketing content. The higher the ratio, the more interested people are in the content. This paper takes the number of likes and the number of comments as the participation amount. Its calculation method is to get all the participation in a period of time divided by the total number of fans, and then multiply by 100. This paper selects the posts published in the latest year, from October 15, 2022 to October 15, 2023, as a sample to measure the marketing content published by Li-Ning’s fans and Li-Ning’s official account to calculate the average participation rate. According to statistics, 72 posts were published in the last year. The total number of likes and comments created was 142799, so the participation rate of fans in the latest year was 142,799/303,000 * 100 = 47.12%. Pull the content of the star endorsements and footwear products graphic release (Figure 5), footwear proportion as high as 53.17%. Of course it includes the star endorsement effect of higher interaction rate. Star endorsements related participation accounted for 37.66%. Interaction rate of clothing, brand co branding, marathon propaganda and daily propaganda marketing content is low. Their fans participation accounted for below 10%.
4.5. The Same Industry Competitors of Instagram Participation Rate
Most sports brands around the world have joined Instagram social media
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Figure 4. Li-Ning stage the number of Ins fans (unit: ten thousand). Data source: Instagram, “Research on Li-Ning Brand AdSocial Media Platform”, “Overseas Social Media Marketing Trend Report of Sports Shoes and Clothing Brands Overseas”.
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Figure 5. Marketing content fan participation ratio. Data source: Instagram.
marketing, but the marketing effect of Instagram brands varies greatly. Thispaper, analyzes the participation rate of competitors and compares the performance of Li-Ning compared with other brands in Instagram. This paper selects international famous brands such as Nike, Adidas, Lululemon as well as Anta, which is also a Chinese overseas brand. From Table 4, Nike has the average number of interactions with each post is high, the number of likes and comments are higher, but the participation rate is the lowest among these six brands, because the number of fans reached 300 million; Adidas has the largest average number of comments and the participation rate is 0.39%, roughly the same as lululemon. While the participation rate of Chinese overseas brands Li-Ning and Anta is higher than international brands, the number of fans and interactions is very small, which is a big gap with international famous brands. Among them, Li-Ning has the highest participation rate, reaching 4.94%, which is a better participation rate and increases more exposure opportunities. To sum up, the larger the number of fans, the lower the Instagram participation rate will generally be.
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Table 4. Li-Ning brand industry competitors ins participation rate comparison.
Data source: https://phlanx.com, Instagram.
5. Based on the 4I Theoretical Model, the Problems in Li-Ning’s Overseas Social Media Marketing
5.1. The Content of the Post Is Not Interesting
The essence of the Internet is about entertainment and fun. The marketing under the Internet should be entertaining and interesting. Li-Ning’s posts on Instagram, such as the spring and summer product series, co-branded and celebrity endorsement products, will have some fun, but compared with the requirements of fans and potential consumers, the fun is not enough. In terms of copywriting, Li-Ning hardly describes the related products or promotional activities with some labels to increase the heat and the copywriting is template, lacking novelty; Li-Ning emphasizes the product details on pictures and lacks some interesting effect; compared with the publicity videos, it is in line with the aesthetic of young people. The acceleration of the pace of life and the fragmented time of consumers have boosted people’s demands for entertainment content. Interesting content is often easier to attract consumer attention than boring content.
5.2. Lack of Precision in User Interest Orientation
Li-Ning in overseas Instagram marketing content, meet the main content of the interest principle is through the copy, copy and pictures in the form of publicity. It is in the copy by emphasizing product features to meet consumer demands. It is cooperate with pictures show product details, and repeatedly with celebrity endorsements prominent product characteristics, these can provide consumers with emotional interests. But in the face of seeking for deep consumer demand is not enough, Li-Ning needs to deeply resonate in the marketing content. In the promotion of clothing products and the launch of some new series of products, Li-Ning only focused on the product itself and only informed consumers of the content of the activities. They did not carry out targeted marketing for the consumption characteristics of users on the social media platform. At present, consumers’ expectations about interest demands even exceed the use value of the products themselves. They prefer to express their interest demands through social media communication content, including inner satisfaction and free expression.
5.3. The Interaction Effect Is Not Ideal Enough
According to the survey results of marketing effect indicators, most people are willing to interact, especially in the number of likes is much higher than the number of comments. However, the interaction effect is still far from the ideal state. On the one hand, the number of comments is often up to hundreds of thousands, but the number of comments is less than hundreds or even most of ten. Consumers are unwilling to forward or release the posts with Li-Ning label, it can be seen that Li-Ning needs to improve the interaction of guiding consumers and forwarding related content; on the other hand, Li-Ning’s attitude towards responding to consumers is far from enough. At the bottom of most comments sections, Li-Ning’s account almost did not reply to consumers’ questions about the product or expressed their attitude to the product. This one-way interaction makes it difficult to build stickiness between brands and consumers. In terms of celebrity marketing, not only is the frequency of interaction with celebrities low, and it does not firmly grasp the dividend of private traffic, but also the frequency of interaction with consumers through celebrity effect is low, which directly affects consumers’ cognition of the brand and purchase intention.
5.4. Post Content Push Is Not Personalized
Li-Ning often publishes repetitive content on Instagram posts, and the copywritings and pictures are not much different in the past few days. There are also problems in the release frequency, the same content in a period of time as well as after a long time without a post. This has seriously exposed Li-Ning’s lack of personalization in the content and release frequency. Li-Ning’s official account does not subdivided consumer demand from multiple dimensions, such as the content of the Z era, the professional products such as badminton and basketball products. The audience is not fully gathered in these two types of preferences, which makes the content push without precision and individuality; the accuracy of the content of clothing, shoes and accessories needs to be optimized.
6. Optimization of Li-Ning’s Overseas Social Media Marketing Strategy Based on the 4I Theory
6.1. Improve the Interesting Narrative Ability of Advertising to Attract Consumers’ Attention
Enhancing the interesting narrative of advertisements makes the content resonate with consumers, and the readability and interest of advertisements attract the attention of consumers. First of all, Li-Ning can change the way that it tells in terms of copywriting and explain products or activities in more interesting and vivid language. It can also be paired with an interesting emoji to attract consumer attention. The use of the labels is very important, directly affecting the exposure. Li-Ning also can use entertaining and brand-related labels that are more popular with the new generation; in the picture, using a more eye-catching color collocation and character action design to enrich the first visual effect, emotionally strong and impressed with consumers and stimulate the resonance; in the video publicity, the editing techniques and picture display are used to add or subtract some interesting elements, improving the visual transmission power. For Instagram, a social media platform, compared with copywriting and video, the intuition of pictures is very attractive to consumers’ attention. It can efficiently deliver relevant information and it is also a major feature of the popularity of ins platform. Therefore, Li-Ning can inject more energy into the increase of picture interest, and work hard on the copy and video after improving the interest of picture interest. After all, new media marketing is becoming more and more mainstream, and the resource of consumer attention is becoming more and more precious. Various marketing of brands on social media strives for the attention of consumer groups.
6.2. Strengthen the Consumer Benefit Orientation from the Multi-Dimensional Perspective
Brands need to cultivate customers’ independent recognition and brand loyalty from marketing. If the so-called marketing does not hit the interests of consumers, then the marketing effect will not meet the expectations. Li-Ning needs to touch the consumption motivation of consumers in the graphic content of Instagram to meet people’s different needs. In the content of the posts, the product information can be put into the life scene to improve the association space of consumers and pay attention to the experience of the scene, especially for basketball shoes and professional badminton products; the product introduction not only to the rational level, but also brand should pay attention to the emotional level, give the consumer group the concept of identity and give meaning to the product; when connecting the sports events and products, it can integrate the own brand image with the concept of sports events, so as to obtain the interests of the audience of sports events, expand the brand communication channels and enhance the popularity.
6.3. Establish a Diversified Interactive Mechanism to Enhance the Brand Reputation
Attracting consumers to interact has become a major focus of social media marketing. Li-Ning not only needs to improve the interaction mechanism from the perspective of consumers, but also needs to improve its own interaction mechanism. On the one hand, Li-Ning needs to improve the frequency of response to the number of comments and increase your communication with your fans. At the same time, it can increase the brand reputation through co-creation and Posting, mentioning each other in the copy and high-frequency interaction in the comment area with the celebrity spokesperson; on the other hand, in terms of guiding consumer interaction, Li-Ning allows relevant brand spokesmen and fans to conduct online interaction of brand publicity activities. This can get recognition from the psychology of fans. In terms of ways, it can ask questions to attract consumers to respond. To guide consumers to participate in relevant activities, for example, the social media campaign with the tag #anything is possible, women can be attracted to interact with relevant questions. Various joint activities with brands also require a high degree of interaction with relevant brands to induce consumers to buy, then enhancing the Li-Ning brand in the global regions of the reputation.
6.4. Strengthen Personalized Marketing for Different Dimensions of Subdivision Groups
The consumer-centered marketing concept has become the mainstream, and the consumer group has been refined into different small circles from the original huge group. Li-Ning brand needs to carry out targeted marketing for different dimensions of subdivided groups. From the segmentation of consumer groups, Li-Ning needs to consider the regional differences and reflect the lives of different people. For example, in the design of footwear, considering the differences of different races, this point needs to be highlighted in marketing. In addition, when promoting the different products of professional athletes and the general public of the products, the functionality of the attention of the professional athletes and the comfort of the general public should be emphasized respectively. The differences in ideology and aesthetics should also be fully taken into account when publishing posts for both male and female products. In terms of product category segmentation, the product category can be extended horizontally to meet the diversified needs of consumers, or the same category can be extended vertically to deepen. For example, releasing more styles and various sports products for shoes, releasing personalized content to attract some subdivided groups, and creating personalized brand image. In this process, it will continue to track consumer demand and popular trend data, laying a good foundation for precision marketing in the future.
7. Conclusion
Based on Chinese Li-Ning in instagram social media platform marketing effect and marketing optimization strategy is expounded and analyzed, this paper found that Li-Ning makes full use of overseas social media platform marketing effect to a certain extent after brands going abroad. As a Chinese brand, it promoted brand awareness overseas, but it still has a larger space in Instagram Marketing. Therefore, this paper selects Li-Ning, a Chinese clothing brand, as the research object, and analyzes the existing marketing problems and optimization measures of Li-Ning in Instagram under the guidance of 4I marketing theory. For Li-Ning, there is a big unsaturated market about Instagram. Li-Ning should pay more attention to consumer interests, meet customer demand, let customers feel “value for money” or even “great value for money”. Therefore, it can make full use of marketing drive product sales in overseas markets and brand reputation, accounting for a certain market share. In addition, Li-Ning’s marketing problems in Instagram also mostly appear in other international Chinese clothing brands. Therefore, the optimization suggestions for social media in this paper can also be used for reference by other clothing brands.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to all those who helped me during the writing of this thesis. My deepest gratitude goes first and foremost to Professor Li Chenggang, my supervisor, for his constant encouragement and guidance. He has walked me through all the stages of the writing of this thesis. Without his consistent and illuminating instruction, this thesis could not have reached its present form.
Fund Project
Key project of Education and Teaching Reform Project of Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology in 2023—Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education and Practical Teaching (ZDJG-2105).