o_18thitrba1dr417tbpqe1soiuvva.pdf

p32 :: Industry
It’s all new for
New Balance
New campaigns, new sponsorships, new product and a new
management team with a new structure ... New Balance SA
is looking forward to an exciting 2014
2014 is going to be an exciting and
interesting year for New Balance
SA. They will be working flat-out to
maximise the benefits of being the
new Comrades Marathon technical
sponsor — starting with the launch of a special
Comrades shoe to offer visual bragging rights
to the athletes who’ll run the 2014 marathon.
The NB Comrades 890 running shoe, available
in men’s and lady’s, is designed for high
mileage training, race day running and will be
available as a limited edition from March 2014.
Then there is the change in top management,
giving practical meaning to the phrase
the world’s a village. Ricky Knight is overseeing
New Balance in South Africa from his base
in Australia, where he has been managing the
Australia, New Zealand, and lately the Pacific
Islands region, for more than ten years.
In line with their policy to act local, think
global, they appointed former New Balance SA
sales manager Craig Bowen as a country manager,
after former GM Gary van Rooyen left to
owner-run the global surf brand Coreban.
But, as they explain, with the advances in
communication, distances shrink to the size
of a computer screen. Knight and Bowen keep
contact with regular Skype sessions — and
probably see as much of each other as other
general managers working in the same city.
They will also be working hard to achieve
New Balance’s international goal of becoming
a top three global athletic brand.
New Balance is currently the fastest growing
sporting brand worldwide — and they have
the figures to prove it, says Darren Tucker, appointed
New Balance vice-president Asia Pacific
in November 2012. Even though they are a
privately-owned unlisted company whose sales
figures are not in the public domain, they can
compare their growth with that published for
competing big brands.
Knight and Tucker visited South Africa at the
Sports Trader :: 2014 March
The inclusion of South Africa
in the Pacific region
was prompted by New Balance’s
policy of looking at
similar customer profiles
end of last year to attend the sales conference
and introduce Knight to the local staff.
They became New Balance colleagues twenty
years ago when Knight joined the Australian
team headed by Tucker. Before that Knight got
to know the other side of the industry from
a retail and sales agent perspective. He followed
in Tucker’s footsteps as general manager
Australia — and later Pacific — after the
latter became general manager of the brand’s
Asia Pacific region in 2001.
Despite his laid-back demeanour, Knight has
done a lot to grow the New Balance business in
Australia and New Zealand, says Tucker.
The inclusion of South Africa in the Pacific
region was prompted by New Balance’s policy
of looking at similar customer profiles when
grouping areas together, Knight explains.
South Africans, Aussies and New Zealanders
share an interest in popular sporting codes like
cricket and rugby, our retail market is fairly
similar and our seasons correspond — our consumer
markets therefore have much more in
common than with the American or European
markets with their different seasons.
Together these markets are big enough to
warrant the development of unique products
best suited to our market needs in the Singapore
R&D centre. And importantly, to develop
the ranges at an appropriate time.
When Bowen was appointed national sales
manager in the middle of 2013, the intention
was that he would have about three years to
learn from MD Gary van Rooyen, before becoming
head of the regional office. When Van
Rooyen left New Balance to run the Coreban
brand globally, Bowen was “propelled into the
hot seat only three months after joining the
company,” says Tucker.
Bowen gained insights into the South African
athletic footwear industry as head of
sports footwear market research at GfK South
Africa. He was responsible for setting up the
GfK Sports Panel after a major sports brand
approached the global research company in
2008 to monitor the sports footwear market
in South Africa.
Bowen had joined GfK six years before as
a product specialist for consumer durable
goods and therefore had ample experience
of convincing brands to sign up to receive
reports and retailers to give them access to
sales information. It helped that many of the
big retailers had already signed up for GfK’s
other consumer product panels. By the time
retailers started selling soccer boots before
the 2010 FIFA World Cup period, they were in
place to track the effect of the tournament on
local boot sales.
Bowen gained further insights into the local
retail market when writing his MBA thesis
on The effect of mass retail buying practices
on competitiveness in the retail value chain,
which he completed at the end of 2012. He
explored what the main retail competitiveness
and sustainable drivers are and how certain
factors and strategies can affect everybody in
the retail value chain.
His work at GfK mainly centred around market
and trend analysis, forecasting and strategic
merchandising, which was valuable when
he joined New Balance. But, being on the inside
is very different from dispassionately analysing
a brand’s performance from the outside,
Bowen admits with a rueful smile.
Now, he is responsible for the performance
of the New Balance SA sales and marketing
teams, whilst support structures (e.g. finance