Reebok, a global sports brand with over a century of history, has been rumored to be changing hands once again, potentially joining a Chinese company. In early August, reports emerged that Anta was set to acquire Reebok, though Anta responded that they would rely on "official announcements."

Reebok's origins trace back to Foster running shoes, established in 1895, before being renamed Reebok in the 1960s. At its peak, it was the world's third-largest sports brand. However, over the past two decades, Reebok has declined under pressure from Adidas and Nike, with its market share falling below 1.5% last year and now facing acquisition rumors.

Reebok's predicament represents a common struggle among legacy brands unable to withstand industry giants. This pattern exists both internationally and domestically.

In China's sportswear market, Anta has been the biggest winner of the past decade, multiplying its net profit ninefold and achieving global top-three revenue through acquisitions of FILA and Amer Sports. Together with Li-Ning, XTEP, and 361°, they form the domestic "Big 4," controlling most of the market.

Below these giants, many Jinjiang-based brands that started early now find themselves confined to regional markets or surviving on contract manufacturing margins.

Similarly, in the liquid milk market, Mengniu and Yili have long dominated half the market, while second-tier players like Bright Dairy and Sanyuan maintain relatively stable market positions. However, regional brands like Ningxia's Jinhe Dairy face increasing competitive pressure.

Compared to twenty years ago, legacy brands across industries struggle more against leading players. This stems partly from operating in traditional sectors like apparel, beverages, and consumer goods. After decades or centuries of evolution, business practices have largely converged, with competition centered on brand strength, capital, and supply chain capabilities - areas where market leaders accumulate advantages over time.

Additionally, in mature industries, market growth slows or stagnates. Under the "80-20 rule," leading players already capture most sales and profits, enabling them to expand market share further. When new customers decrease, non-leading legacy brands often feel the industry chill first.

Facing these challenges, legacy brands are attempting self-rescue by moving business online and cultivating e-commerce as a second growth curve. However, e-commerce has passed its wild growth period, and legacy brands face high costs, difficult customer acquisition, and expensive traffic when opening online stores.

Some companies caught "massive traffic" through fortunate circumstances, like White Elephant, Hongxing Erke, and Yumeijing, but most legacy brands lack the opportunity or capability to become overnight internet sensations.

Moreover, many brands, despite their long history, lack market insight, user research, and brand awareness, preferring experience-based business decisions. While "legacy" status can enhance trustworthiness, it can also trap companies in past practices and limit innovation.

To survive in an environment where giants are "sinking down," legacy brands collectively face a major test: re-understanding consumers and market conditions, restructuring R&D, production, marketing, and sales processes, and rebuilding their entire capability matrix and business strategy to find new enterprise niches.

In this new battle for legacy brands, some started early and achieved significant transformation results, while many others continue exploring, with considerable distance remaining to exit their valleys.

**A**

Before feeling pressure from industry leaders, many legacy brands recognized the need to find growth through e-commerce channels rather than defending old channels against giants head-on. However, their entry was slow with limited investment.

Jinjiang's leading children's shoe brand Big Wasp, established in 2003, didn't enter online markets until 2012. Ningxia's "time-honored" Jinhe Dairy, which built its reputation in 1998, didn't join traditional e-commerce platforms until 2019, achieving nearly 400,000 yuan in sales that year.

Meanwhile, consumption trend changes are reflected in data: domestic online shopping accounted for approximately 12.6% of total retail sales in 2015, rising to 26.8% by 2024.

If legacy brands across industries once debated whether to do e-commerce over a decade ago, they now face not whether to do it, but how to do it well.

They quickly discovered that on traditional e-commerce platforms, giants not only have more sophisticated strategies but can mobilize far superior funds and resources, building stronger competitive barriers than offline.

Take Big Wasp as an example: at its peak, it became one of the top three children's shoe brands by sales on traditional e-commerce platforms. However, in recent years, major brands have continuously lowered prices, threatening Big Wasp's market share and forcing it to adjust pricing strategies, maintaining profits by expanding sales volume and reducing costs.

This Matthew effect of the strong getting stronger is a fundamental challenge legacy brands cannot avoid in e-commerce.

From an external perspective, leading players can dominate e-commerce because nationwide high-speed logistics networks enable giants to easily reach more markets and consumers. Legacy brands originally used geographical location as natural barriers, conducting local and surrounding business only. Now, giants can penetrate every market segment through e-commerce, eliminating legacy brands' barriers.

With e-commerce assistance, leading players can erode legacy brands' market share, but legacy brands struggle to capture market share from leading companies after going online.

Legacy brands, accustomed to local offline business and skilled in "ground warfare," are unfamiliar with e-commerce. During the shelf e-commerce era, they lacked talent and energy to manage online stores effectively. When live-streaming e-commerce emerged, they couldn't afford top streamers' "slot fees" and struggled with store broadcasting.

Many legacy brands paid tuition fees for not understanding e-commerce. Crayon Shin-chan, established in 2000 and famous for fruit jelly, was once one of China's largest jelly manufacturers. In 2017, the company entered e-commerce through agency operation models but fell into the predicament of "selling more, losing more." Later team changes brought no improvement.

Additionally, traditional e-commerce platforms never considered small-scale, dispersed legacy brands as premium support targets. Taking Jinjiang's snack industry as an example, many companies entered online channels early with substantial investment. However, their common experience has been that despite opening various online stores, platform traffic hasn't tilted toward them. Particularly after 2023, as traditional e-commerce growth slowed, legacy brands' sense of being "ignored" intensified.

The deeper reason is that legacy brands have developed traditional methodologies over many years: supply-side production based on sales, marketing through celebrity endorsements and TV advertising, and sales through distributor systems. This sluggish old system clearly cannot match the fast-paced e-commerce business.

Perhaps recognizing their capability shortcomings, some time-honored brands didn't prioritize e-commerce channels for long periods. Jinguan, a candy company established in 1982 that gained market recognition with brown sugar preserved plum candy and became a wedding banquet "standard," started e-commerce in 2015. Three years later, this business segment accounted for less than 1% of revenue.

Legacy brands that couldn't master e-commerce were actually having their market share divided by leading players. When entire industries grew rapidly, everyone could share increasingly larger pieces of the pie, keeping contradictions subdued. However, as industries matured and external environments changed, giants targeted smaller players' market share, quickly increasing legacy brands' survival pressure.

How to quickly build online presence and offset the Matthew effect has become a mandatory question for all time-honored brands.

**B**

In many industries, most time-honored brands remain in exploratory stages for e-commerce. However, some companies have found new strategies suitable for legacy brands.

This approach's core logic involves brands cooperating closely with e-commerce platforms to regain hit-making capabilities.

In earlier years, companies established themselves through hit products. For example, Jinhe Dairy's small yellow bag yogurt represents local childhood memories; Jinguan's brown sugar preserved plum candy and Crayon Shin-chan's fruit jelly similarly became benchmark products through word-of-mouth.

However, these early hits weren't market research products but relied more on founders' market intuition and product talent, plus the era's limited e-commerce development and consumer choices.

Today, legacy brands obviously cannot rely on founders' flashes of inspiration for product planning and R&D. Some brands have developed hit-making methodologies: positioning customer groups, precise R&D, rapid product testing, and marketing amplification.

Jinguan initially positioned itself in wedding candy but now expands into leisure scenarios. They noticed that compared to traditional e-commerce channels, PDD Holdings has more young users, with demographics concentrated in the 18-25 age group, matching their target student customer base. This prompted them to focus on PDD Holdings as their online priority.

After finding new customer groups, legacy brands need matching new products, which also requires e-commerce platforms' consumer data insights and operational support.

For example, Jinguan started with wedding candy characterized by high sweetness, unsuitable for weight-conscious young people. Following platform suggestions, they began developing sugar-free products in 2021, launching their first sugar-free mint candy two years later.

For existing product lines, Jinguan also adjusts based on platform feedback data and requirements. Noticing young people prefer assembling their own wedding candy, they reduced their main product brown sugar preserved plum candy from 6.5 grams per piece to 4 grams, providing more pieces per bag and improving cost-effectiveness.

Driven by new products, Jinguan's e-commerce segment showed significant improvement. In 2023, its single-store annual sales on PDD Holdings reached 6-7 million yuan, with some stores surpassing traditional e-commerce platforms; online sales proportion increased from less than 1% to around 10%.

Another snack company, Youchen, has long produced meat floss cakes, accumulating over 50 million consumers. After 2018, Youchen began focusing on e-commerce. They noticed in PDD Holdings comment sections that consumers wanted new flavors. With platform assistance, Youchen successively launched scallion and spicy flavors, even pizza bread, to improve product matrix coverage of market demand.

After companies develop new products, small-scale sales and rapid testing become crucial - an indispensable element for legacy brands creating hits.

Yake, an established snack company starting with hard candy, has V9 vitamin-filled candy as its flagship product. After joining PDD Holdings in 2017, the platform suggested converting V9 vitamin-filled candy into soft candy to increase consumption frequency and create new hits.

Yake adopted this suggestion. They noticed that on PDD Holdings, companies could understand genuine consumer feedback on new products within a week. In traditional distributor channels, this required at least six months.

After successful testing, Yake heavily promoted this soft candy, which has become a new hot-selling item.

Casual footwear brand Bull Family similarly launched multiple hit products on PDD Holdings, forming a methodology: design in thousands of units, enter sampling with 500-600 pieces, then select 20 models for small-batch testing on platforms like PDD Holdings. Products with good data feedback receive mass production and online-offline marketing support to increase hit potential.

After regaining hit-making capabilities, legacy brands have new development options. They can escape direct competition with leading players, no longer confined to zero-sum games around existing markets, but satisfy new demands with new hits.

Legacy brands that long followed industry leaders once again have opportunities to become segment leaders, laying foundations for long-term business recovery.

**C**

Besides launching new hits, legacy brands seek to polish their "signatures" again.

Previously, many companies used "National Gold Award" and "Famous Trademark" for promotion, hiring popular celebrity endorsements and advertising on major TV stations to stand out from competitors.

Today, such discourse systems and endorsement methods have clearly aged. Legacy brands wanting to move new-generation consumers and gain young people's attention and favor need new brand connotations and memorable points.

Some legacy brands turn to internet personality endorsements, like "recommended by certain streamers." Others choose cooperation with e-commerce platforms, particularly those starting from contract manufacturing, who urgently need to complete brand building from zero to one.

In such situations, e-commerce platform endorsements matter more than influencer sales.

In Fujian's developed contract manufacturing industry, many merchants apply for PDD Holdings' "Black Label" - a quality brand certification mark that PDD Holdings evaluates based on brand influence, product qualifications, sales volume, and other factors.

With Black Labels, legacy brands can further differentiate from white-label and private-label merchants, enhancing brand power and sales.

Take children's shoe specialist Big Wasp: it has opened over 20 stores on PDD Holdings, almost all Black Label stores. In 2024, Big Wasp's sales on PDD Holdings reached approximately 30 million yuan, with first-quarter sales triple the previous year's same period, potentially reaching 100 million yuan annually.

However, obtaining Black Label certification has high thresholds. Bull Family achieved 600 million yuan in online sales last year, targeting 1 billion yuan this year. The company has communicated with PDD Holdings since last year, hoping to obtain Black Labels. They've made numerous adjustments to product design R&D and brand recognition, including co-building laboratories with local professional institutions, using carbon fiber to improve products, and incorporating brand elements into soles and uppers.

Legacy brands creating hits and cultivating brands on PDD Holdings naturally receive platform welcome. Previously, PDD Holdings introduced various merchant support projects, including billion-yuan reductions, trillion-yuan support, "E-commerce Goes West," and new-quality merchant support plans, with specific actions including funding and traffic support, deposit reductions, technical service fees, and logistics cost reductions, helping merchants reduce burdens and improve ROI and profit margins.

Many legacy brands benefit from these measures. For example, Big Wasp expects to receive 1-2 million yuan in promotional fee returns this year alone.

Besides continuous support measures, PDD Holdings' product-centric traffic allocation mechanism also aligns with legacy brands' breakthrough needs.

Compared to industry leaders, legacy brands lag in brand influence, traffic acquisition capabilities, and operational abilities, struggling to compete comprehensively on traditional e-commerce platforms.

In contrast, PDD Holdings emphasizes product weight - as long as "quality-price ratio" is outstanding enough, regardless of merchant or brand, products can receive intensive exposure and massive orders.

This means leading players' advantages beyond products are diminished; legacy brands with "hits" can achieve ideal sales at lower costs without extreme price pressure in direct competition with giants.

Twenty to thirty years ago, private enterprises nationwide competed vigorously with unique strategies, eventually producing leading companies in various fields and time-honored brands, creating vibrant commercial ecosystems.

Now, in more intense competitive environments, legacy brands are gradually emerging from past glory, seeking opportunities to gain business growth through e-commerce platform assistance without "hard fighting" against leading companies.

This is destined to be a long revival, but successfully renewed hits like Ningxia milk and Fujian candy also indicate that legacy brands will collectively see clearer skies ahead.