We are looking to expand to smaller towns: Asics Sharma

Sharma said that Asics India is looking beyond Tier-I cities to increase its presence and works with athletes across various sports to gain marketing momentum. Edited excerpts from an interview:

Has Asics’ late entry in India hindered it?

Marketing has been the driving force for the brand. If you look at us and other brands that have spent around 20-25 years in India, we are still big in terms of marketing spend. But our intention was that we wanted to be closer to the runners. So instead of spending a lot of money on advertising to drive communication, we thought the first step would be to interact and communicate with Indian runners as shoes are our main strength. For this we started sponsoring the Mumbai Marathon. This event is important to us because we call ourselves a scientific brand. So before starting our subsidiaries in India, we wanted to educate ourselves about the running community. The company’s first partnership with the event’s promoters, Procam International, began in 2009 as a ‘Sports Goods Partner’.

Is brand awareness an issue for you compared to older brands?

This is true because we are new entrants and started around 2015. But any brand will find it challenging if they start late as compared to other brands which are around 15-20 years in terms of brand awareness. I think what we have achieved in the last five years is great and we are not far from other brands. But at this point in time, awareness is something we are seriously working on.

Are there going to be more sports sponsorships or partnerships?

Yes, to increase our presence in South India, we started participating in the World 10K event in Bengaluru, which is a huge event with around 26,000 participants. Plus, we have our Running Club, an all-inclusive running group led by experienced runners with weekly training programs created by runners.

Are you also engaging with celebrities and athletes to promote your brand?

On the advertising front, we have Tiger Shroff as our brand ambassador to reach out to the young audience for fitness, which is at the core of what we do. We don’t shy away from other sports either. If we talk about the Olympics last year, although globally we were sponsoring it, we also had a campaign in India where we signed contracts in different sports.

All the other brands also have a lot of athletes, but our focus is basically on someone who is very performance-oriented. For example, Ravindra Jadeja is one such athlete. He has a campaign with him. We also bet on Bajrang Punia and Manika Batra. When we hire these athletes, we create a lot of content with them, showcase their journey to Indian consumers with a brand message and use a lot of mediums to promote it.

We are not immediately heavy on traditional media. In today’s world, if we look at the marketing trends, they are moving towards digital platforms, digital screens in the atrium of shopping malls, that’s where the communication is happening. We are also taking our ads on YouTube and spending on advertising on OTT platforms like Sony Liv, which was the official partner of the Olympic broadcast here.

We will not shy away from traditional media because it is a media that gets a lot of attention.

Are you expanding your store presence?

Till now we were focusing on Tier-1 and metros, so we have a lot of stores there. Now I think the progress is basically on Tier-II and -III markets. From research we are seeing that many people are buying from these areas.

How much does online contribute to total sales?

Before the pandemic, we were focused on offline retail, and after the pandemic, the change has been huge. Earlier 20-25% of our sales were online, now we do about 35-40% of our sales online.