In 2023, can outdoor sports reproduce the prosperity of the first year?

Sports and outdoor products must inevitably fall from the altar and return to their original market share. Both Party A and Party B must start from the product and explore innovative content to create more outdoor marketing cases in 2023. The following article will introduce whether outdoor sports can continue to shine in 2023. Let's take a look.

From the outdoor camping trend to the Frisbee craze, to the sales of outdoor sports equipment such as land dash boards and skateboards, the sales volume continues to rise. In the post-epidemic era, the content in the field of sports and outdoor sports has frequently become popular and has become a hot spot for brand marketing in 2022. Many track and non-track brands have taken advantage of marketing to ride the traffic fast lane, but traffic hotspots often come and go quickly. Liu Genghong's 50 million miracle has gradually been forgotten. With the fading of the first generation of popularity and the homogenization of marketing content, can sports and outdoor sports continue to shine in 2023?

1. Before making any inferences, we must first understand: How did the trend of outdoor sports come about?

There are many different opinions in the industry about the concept of the first year of outdoor sports. Whether it is 2020, 2021 or 2022, outdoor sports have changed from professional hobbies to social trends. There are no coincidences behind all social phenomena, only opportunities; behind the opportunities are the inevitable results of a long-term development process. I think we can attribute the strong rise of outdoor sports to the following factors:

• Macro factors: As people's living standards improve, the population base of the new middle class has further expanded. With the support of consumption upgrades and a series of encouraging policies, the sports outdoor market has been given a more fertile soil foundation.
• Industry factors: The sports outdoor craze has not only been driven by traditional sports outdoor brands, but also by the rise of new dark horses. In addition, many brands are also taking advantage of the outdoor trend to market, providing a continuous stream of new potential for the sports outdoor trend.
• User factors: Under the influence of the epidemic, people's indoor leisure and entertainment have been restricted, and the openness, sociality and freedom of outdoor sports have been highly praised by people. At the same time, outdoor sports, fitness and camping have been brought to the screen, bringing users an outdoor "cloud experience" in boring closed time. Sports outdoor activities and content bring users psychological benefits of leisure, fashion, social interaction and healing.
• Platform factors: Internet new media content has become a distribution center for public opinion and trends, especially with high penetration and influence among young people. The momentum of outdoor marketing has spiraled under the impressive data results. In addition, many social media platforms have formed an integrated content marketing-e-commerce conversion chain. The brand-influencer-content-user closed-loop system brought by the platform has generated a strong driving force for outdoor marketing content.
• Event factors: As major news events, large-scale sports events always stir up storms in the advertising and new media industries. The 2022 Winter Olympics and World Cup will undoubtedly play a role in fueling the outdoor sports trend to a great extent.

2. Next, let’s think about what happened to outdoor sports in 2022?

Let me first give you the most intuitive feeling. I have never felt that the era of national fitness is so close to us.

There are several major characteristics among them, which I summarize as: experience, lightweight, segmentation, and modeling.

Experience: This has two meanings. Users watch sports and outdoor content with a strong purpose of replacing experience. As mentioned above, the epidemic has closed people's opportunities to experience outdoor sports offline, so online has opened another window for users. Another meaning is that popular content is always content that brings freshness to users - unique fancy camping; unpopular and niche Frisbee sports; cool street skateboarding... Therefore, the sense of experience can also be said to be the user's sense of freshness.

Lightweight: Outdoor sports are highly professional. Even in the fitness circle, there are many factions. However, the hot trend has led more and more novices to try to join these circles. The rule of starting from the shallower to the deeper also applies here. Lightweight outdoor activities such as frisbee and camping that do not require high financial and physical resources can carry a wide range of interest groups and achieve traffic breakthrough.

Segmentation: Outdoor sports are linked to trends, and related topics on social platforms are diversified, involving different segments and scenarios; in addition to professional equipment, related concepts such as dressing, food, and photography have become popular one after another. Users not only pursue the pleasure brought by sports, but also hope to use outdoor sports as a lifestyle to enjoy quality and ritual. More segmented vertical circles are a sign of maturity, but under the massive and rapidly changing hot spots, emerging outdoor enthusiasts who have not yet formed loyal habits may just be "passerby fans" who dabble in the segmented circles.

Patterning: A great content idea will generate a lot of imitative and borrowed content within a week after it becomes a hit. This is a common problem in social media today, especially in short video platforms. The outdoor sports track itself is a selling point for being one of the few outdoor ways to play, and with the entry of other tracks, a large amount of patterned content has gradually made the audience tired. Data shows that the current outdoor sports methods are affected by the season, and the single skiing method accounts for the vast majority.

3. Where should we go in 2023?

According to authoritative data released by Korn Ferry: China's sports outdoor market size is predicted to maintain a high growth rate of 10%, achieving sales of 600 billion yuan in 2025.

• From the perspective of e-commerce business, today's outdoor sports market is an era where dark horses are madly competing internally and the profits of leading brands are shrinking.
• From the perspective of content marketing, current sports outdoor marketing lacks innovation and is filled with homogeneous content.
• From the perspective of user demand, the hot spot of outdoor sports is just one of the thousands of trends that can be used to show one's own taste. It comes and goes in a flash.

Sports and outdoor products must inevitably fall from the altar to the mortal world and return to their original market share position. Regardless of whether it is Party A or Party B, they must start from the product and explore innovative content in order to create more successful outdoor marketing cases in 2023.

As for outdoor marketing, this is not a topic that has become popular in the past two years. To be honest, it has always been very popular and has always been very competitive.

Author: Qifei Network