Lululemon invests a lot of money and resources in launching big brand events around the world. There are different events for fun of sports and for fun of women yoga wear in different countries, such as London’s Hot Sweat Festival, Vancouver’s 10K run, etc.

The first of the Unroll China yoga events, which opened in China in 2016, was held at the Imperial Temple in Beijing. Subsequently, lululemon Heart Show China events were held in various cities and became the brand’s biggest event of the year, with each event being a large gathering of community partners, work out clothing women and exercise enthusiasts.

The overall event was really great! In addition to setting up a showroom of compression sports bra, there is no other marketing behavior, it is completely the brand community of all people celebrate together, almost all of the participants will take the initiative to send friends to promote.
Similar to offline, lululemon’s strategy on social media is more inclined to content marketing and less paid placement. We can analyze it from three perspectives: UGC, PGC and BGC.
BGC：Brand-generated Content
PGC：Professional-generated Content
UGC：User-generated Content
BGC is the content produced by lululemon global and local brand teams. The content here refers to content materials other than commercials, mainly in four categories: product introduction, creative short films, yoga and fitness science, and community stories.
The product and creative short film works of lululemon on YouTube have extremely high production standard from copywriting and soundtrack to creative concept and short film texture details.
Fitness Science includes sports experts in yoga, meditation, running and training to share their professional knowledge. The content is refined according to different scenarios, such as novice-oriented content, sports science sharing, specialized asana explanations, and 45-minute long training video lessons. Community stories continue the lululemon community-based strategy, focusing on and sharing the stories of ambassadors or users in the brand’s community.

PGC is mainly content produced by professional opinion leaders. Take China as an example, lululemon will also look for KOLs in the field of sports on social media, such as Weibo, WeChat and Xiaohongshu, to collaborate and influence people in the fitness vertical, to educate and seed the brand, the most popular one is High Waist Fitness Leggings. For example, there are 10,000+ notes volume searching lululemon on Xiaohongshu, and many contents such as cool women’s hoodies have more than 1000 likes on their notes, providing consumers with real evaluation experience and buying guide. Brand ambassadors are mainly coaches, although not everyone is a network celebrity, but are real, accurate fans, professional to the recommendation and endorsement, but also has a very high value.

The most likely problem with UGC, also known as user-produced content, is that user sharing is easily scattered and fine-grained. But lululemon has subsumed the online voice by unifying topics. For example, lululemon unified the hashtag topic #thesweatlife in Instagram and offline activities, guiding users to post posts after exercise, and the number of posts is now over 1.1 million. The biggest benefit of not forcing the use of brand words is that it lowers the psychological pressure and threshold for users to share.

There is no superior or inferior content marketing strategy or placement-based strategy. The advantages of content marketing strategy are low cost, accurate crowd, and the long-tail effect brought by content deposited in social media. The disadvantage is the high cost of time, there is no way to directly bring goods and monitor ROI.
However, due to the specificity of consumer behavior and the verticality of the population in the sports category, it is instead more appropriate to adopt a long-term oriented content marketing strategy in social media.