Former Olympic gymnast Li Ning parlayed his athletic success into an eponymous multimillion dollar business by establishing China’s first real sporting goods brand. Sadly Li Ning’s logo and slogan are a shameless rip off of Nike’s, but their advertising is starting to get interesting:
The logo and slogan are at the bottom left of the ad, to the right of a weird Li Ning / Olympic Games hybrid logo. Note the similarity of the logo to the Nike swoosh. The slogan is equally sad: it means ‘everything is possible’, i.e. ‘you can do whatever you want to’, i.e. ‘just do it’ (yiqie jie you keneng).
But the ad itself is a little more original: a picture of a girl who can kick butt, in a seedy-looking gym locker setting, with the text ‘good bye’ (‘zaijian’).
But what does the ‘XL’ below the girl’s elbow mean? That is not too clear. I asked ten Beijingers what they thought it meant. Six of them said it meant that the girl worked out, lost weight, and thus said goodbye to XL size clothes. The other four said that the XL meant that she was saying goodbye to a boxing competitor who was big and strong and wore XL size clothing.
The real answer is probably that the creative team behind the ad could not resist adding an abstract piece of meaningless nonsense to what would have been a pure, uncluttered message.
If you want a high res image so that you can see the logos clearly, please email jeremy -at- danwei.org.