I still remember the first pair of branded sneakers I got. It was from , which I recall being that generation of Indians’ Nike, Reebok and Adidas combined. I believe Action was the first sports shoes brand in India and this ad, featuring none other than Sachin Tendulkar (and Kunal Khemu) should tell you how big the brand was, back in the 80s and 90s.
Anyway, the pair that I purchased from a shoe store in R.S.Puram, Coimbatore, in hindsight, was terribly ugly. It was black and fluorescent yellow, with fluorescent lace! I have no idea what made me, then in standard 10 or 11, buy that pair. But it was the apple of my eye back then, for about 2-3 weeks, till it went dirty and just a pair of shoes.
Why this reminiscence? Because we got out our son his first pair of branded Nike Basketball shoes recently.
Given that he’s growing, we usually end up buying school shoes from Bata or Decathlon. Decathlon is the default choice to pick up shoes for his football practice. When he got into the school basketball team (given his 6+ foot height, it was a given), he said he wanted a pair of basketball shoes.
Our default choice was – ‘Let’s go to Decathlon’. We have a Decathlon 2 kms away from home. But his reaction: ‘They have only the Tarmak range of basketball shoes that the whole school has. I want branded shoes!’.
In his mind, not only was Tarmak (Decathlon’s in-house brand of basketball shoes) not branded, but Decathlon’s shoes, by nature of a lot of people at school wearing it, was too common!
This says a lot about how prevalent Decathlon’s in-house brands are, even though they do not advertise individual brands at all and only market the overall Decathlon brand.
He searched online and zeroed in on a pair of basketball shoes from Nike, on Myntra where they were going at a very good discount (from the Rs.5K+ actual price) of more than 50%. We ordered that and it arrived the next day, in an Amazon-like experience (the same pair was far more expensive on Amazon, incidentally).
When he got the package, he opened it and was seen admiring the pair of shoes for a long time. And then he said, ‘Know what? These are my first ever Nike shoes!’
That, right there, is the power of branding! 🙂