The impact of branding on racket perception: Does marketing help or hurt the consumer?
The rule of three states that the human psyche works well recognizing patterns in groups of three. So in order to make it easier for your little pea brain to comprehend, all major racket companies tend to split their products amongst three lineups, typically representing “power”, “speed”, and “control” oriented rackets. Yonex has their Astrox, Nanoflare, and Arcsaber series and Victor has Thruster, Auraspeed, and DriveX (yes I know theres also Jetspeed and Bravesword, no, I don’t think the Victor marketing division knows what the hell they’re doing). Li-Ning’s current lineup consists of AxForce, BladeX, and their newest series, Halbertec.
If you’ve read some of my other articles you may also know that I have a strong distaste for categorizing rackets with broad descriptors like “power”, or “control”, since it doesn’t actually tell you anything about how the racket plays. For example, although Yonex Astrox and Li-Ning AxForce rackets are both marketed as “power” series, they generally pursue that power through completely different means. As a result, one might pick up an Astrox 88S Pro, then play with a Li-Ning AxForce 80 and find that it feels completely alien almost like a racket from a different sport. This poses an issue, as players who are not experienced with a wide variety of racket products who may like Astrox rackets could be searching for potential candidates and commit to a purchase simply based on the fact that the racket they just bought is a Li-Ning AxForce racket.
This disconnect between racket and branding is even more egregious with the term “control”. At least with “speed” oriented rackets you can surmise that the racket will swing quickly and be relatively maneuverable, and that “power” rackets have an intention of generating shuttle velocity, regardless of how they might achieve that goal. However with “control” it’s not even entirely clear what the goal is with these rackets. My best effort at a description boils down to “a racket that is designed to place the shuttle more consistently towards certain locations in the court”, but that’s also too vague to be useful in any capacity because really, shouldn’t any racket be able to hit the shuttle towards where you want it to go? And that’s not even completely correct because across brands it’s not even consistent whether “control” refers to the racket’s ability to control the shuttle, or the player’s ability to control the racket.
Another issue with the rule of three is that manufacturers can pigeonholed into designing for one of their three established racket series. Let’s say that Victor wanted to design a speed racket but with a frame more akin to the Yonex Nanoflare 700, that is a hollow oval cross-section frame as opposed to the sword frames that are typical of Auraspeed rackets. Being a speed racket, it would logically belong under the Auraspeed namesake, but its design and feeling of play would feel completely different than any other Auraspeed racket. Of course it is possible to do this anyways, but a brand risks decreasing the coherency of its series by introducing rackets to the lineup that are completely different than the others. The Yonex Astrox and Nanoflare series are both guilty of this with rackets like the Astrox 99 Pro and Astrox 88S Pro sharing very little DNA, and the original Nanoflare 800 existing as an outlier to the rest of the Nanoflare series with its box frame.
As much as I personally dislike major racket brands sorting their rackets into three categories, I think that this paradigm goes both ways and is useful for both manufacturers and consumers as it does give the buyer a vague image of what they intend to buy. And if the manufacturer successfully builds a coherent identity around a racket series, it definitely be a strength.
To give some examples of racket series with coherent identities, The Li-Ning AxForce series and Halbertec series each contains rackets extremely close in nature with slight variations. The Victor Bravesword series had a multitude of models across the years, each sharing a nearly identical sword frame. If you get a racket from a racket series with a strong identity, you have a good expectation for what you were getting, and that significantly increases a customer’s trust in the brand.
Let’s take a look at Redson’s racket series for a minute. Redson currently produces rackets in five different series: Shape, US (Ultra Dynamic Shape), RG (Rigidity), AT (Aeroblast), and Beta. Without even digging through specific models in each racket series, you might already have several questions regarding the identity of each series. Just from the catalog page we can see that two of the series leverage octagonal shapes in their frames, two of the series use oval shapes in their frames, and three of the series are marketed as “aerodynamic”. So what the hell is going on here exactly?
After doing a little reading I was able to deduce that these racket series are primarily distinct based on their frame type. The Shape series is characterized by its dimples with most of the models having oval shape frames (save the SG, which is a unique model with an aerodynamic sword frame, but no it doesn’t belong in the AT series because it has dimples duh). The US series rackets are unique because of their hybrid racket frames, which all have aerodynamic, oval, and octagonal shape parts in the frame, although to the untrained eye they could easily also be mistaken for sword frame rackets that belong in the AT series. The RG series has rackets with octagonal frame shapes, the AT series has rackets with sword frame shapes, and the Beta series has rackets with normal oval frame shapes.
I want to stress that as aside from the anomalies, sorting by frame design is a perfectly valid and coherent way to arrange rackets in groups. To someone with an exposure to a large variety of rackets such as myself, this makes sense. Five categories is quite a lot to keep track of for most buyers, and this issue is compounded by the more significant problem of not aligning with the industry standard categories of “power”, “speed”, and “control”. Rather, none of the categories seem to closely adhere to a specific identity except for the AT series, which seems the most likely candidate for the “speed” category as presented by its sword frame rackets. Despite each series remaining coherent from a technical standpoint, the average racket buyer doesn’t know about and likely doesn’t care about the frame type, they just want to know if the racket will swing fast or hit hard.
In my opinion this is a problem on both sides. Of course in an ideal world I would like badminton players to be educated about the equipment they use; that’s part of why I write these articles and reviews to begin with. But the reality is most players don’t care very deeply about their equipment. Hell, even some top level professional players either just use whatever is given to them by their sponsor, or entirely have no idea what racket they are using. But I also think that racket manufacturers do benefit from giving their rackets an identity or persona that helps buyers understand, otherwise buyers will simply lean towards products whose identity is more clear. In other words, I’ll buy a Yonex Arcsaber racket over a Redson Shape racket, since I know that Arcsaber is a control oriented racket.
I’m not insinuating that what Yonex, Victor, and Li-Ning are doing is perfect, I don’t think that simply slapping “power”, “speed”, and “control” on Redson rackets is going to fix their branding issue, and conversely I still think that these three categories are too broad and vague to describe the racket series that the major manufacturers produce. There must be some middle ground that slightly clarifies what kind of experience the racket series has to offer. For example, the Yonex Astrox series was originally marketed as “steep attack”, and I think that’s something they need to push more, because gives a better idea of what kind of experience the racket series offers. Arcsaber could be marketed as “hold control” while the Shape series could be “smooth control”, and RG could be “rigid attack”. Or even better, the racket series identity could be alluded to in the name of the series itself, like Li-Ning’s AxForce series which implies heavy-handed momentum based power rackets that cut through the shuttle, or their Halbertec series which is conducive to a versatile attacking style with rackets that feel long reaching and direct.
If you’re trying to buy a racket and you’re often confused by what a racket series does, don’t feel bad. Even as someone who’s knowledgeable about rackets I often have a difficult time explaining what each racket series is supposed to represent. At the end of the day the only certainty is in trying a racket with your preferred setup, but unfortunately that’s out of the question for most prospective racket buyers. I hope that more companies will take notes from the clever things Li-Ning has done, resulting in strong identities for each of their racket series. At the very least we can agree to do better than whatever the hell JNice is doing.
