Li-Ning Gold Badminton Shoes

So what does a leading Chinese consumer company do when it wants to overhaul its brand? In the case of Li Ning, the sportswear company founded in 1990 by the Olympic gymnast of the same name, it turned to a design and branding consultant based in Portland, Oregon – home of its strongest rival, Nike.

The tale of how Li Ning worked with Portland-based Ziba to overhaul its 7,000 small branded retail stores across China makes for an interesting case study for local brand-building in an emerging market.

"They came to us and said, ‘how do we become the Nike of China?'" says Jeremy Kaye, creative director of Ziba, of the initial meeting some two years ago. "We said, you are Li Ning, you don't need to be Nike."

Mr Kaye delivered a presentation on the partnership between the two companies in New York on Monday at the annual trade show of the National Retail Federation, along with Jay Li, general manager of Li Ning's international division. In a process that Mr Li compared with a trip to the psychiatrist for Li Ning, Ziba first set worked on identifying Li Ning's "brand DNA", and then on analyzing its customer base, and after that on streamlining and redesigning its previously somewhat chaotic store network.

For Li Ning, says Mr Li, the process was sparked by concerns that the brand was losing touch with young Chinese, contributing to Li Ning losing its leading position as the top Chinese sports brand to Nike in 2003, and falling to third behind Nike and Adidas in 2004. (The company has since regained the number two spot.) Even though Li Ning was only founded in 1990, "they saw us as their parents' brand," he says.

So what did Ziba find out for its Chinese client? That the target market of 340m young Chinese consumers are like us, "only different," perhaps most