Catching Up With Puma's Joerg Zobel
China has 1.3 billion people, and twice as many feet. The shoe and sports apparel market in a nation filled with young people is rich and competitive.
Joerg Zobel is general manager of Asia Pacific for Puma, and today the German-based sports apparel company showed its true colors. In a merger of music, fashion and sports, Puma staged a media event with Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, who could come away from Beijing with three gold medals. The event was a little sports and a lot of lifestyle, a word Zobel uses often.
SportsBusiness Journal Olympics correspondent Jay Weiner sat down with Zobel at the CJW Jazz Bar, site of Bolt’s first pre-Olympic news conference.
You talk about Puma being a fashion brand and a lifestyle brand. Was that a strategy developed out of resignation that Nike and Adidas are the “big boys” and you need to find a niche? Are you competing head-on with them?
Zobel: I wouldn’t say head-on because our positioning is slightly different, here in China and worldwide. You always want to be the brand that does things a bit differently, with a fun twist to it, a fashion twist, a lifestyle twist. … We work with top designers. We don’t want to be another version of another performance brand. There’s enough of those guys out there with huge billboards.
How will you measure how well your sponsorship of Bolt and others does within the Chinese market?
Zobel: There are two elements. We have collections directly linked to (the Chinese campaign). In terms of our running collections, in the first half of this year compared to last year, we’ve doubled our sales. The other measure is the one that’s hard to measure, brand equity. Having great athletes that bring great personality to it, it shows that Puma is positioned in a different way.
The lifestyle part of the marketing, does it skew toward women? A Nike store seems a bit guy-oriented. Are you trying to target women?
Zobel: As a brand, we’re design driven. So we would attract women, but the nice thing is that doesn’t repel the boys or men. They understand we have great athletes. There’s the angle in motorsports that we have to offer. This year, we’ve sponsored teams in Formula One in Shanghai. We also sponsor sailing. We’re quite balanced.
