Nike's O2O weapon: getting consumers to move again

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On the day of "11", when everyone was focused on the cat, Nike understated the Twitter-like public service account for the Nike run Club.

Just 10 days into the line, the account for running enthusiasts has attracted 16,124 followers, with the built-in run-team features built into the account, which quickly created more than 1000 running-themed micro-groups.

That's a big surprise for Nike officials. The micro-mail test is another example of Nike's many moves over the past year in the Internet and digital world.

After 2010, the domestic sporting goods market suffered a whole industry recession. The problem of inventory puzzles almost every company in the industry, and Nike is no exception.

However, although cleaning up the inventory and channel adjustment to every business, Nike still make a move to advance another important work, that is to promote their own digital platform Nike.

2013 was the year when Nike's digital strategy was rooted in China. Nike in the big and small offline activities, began to vigorously promote their digital platform Nike. After nearly a year of efforts, Nike's digital platform has experienced explosive growth. The exclusive data from the business value show that, as of October, the number of Nike online communities in the Greater China market grew by 130% compared with last year; Nike's app downloads at the mobile end grew from 570,000 last year to 2.58 million, up 350%.

There is only one purpose behind these efforts-to get Chinese consumers to move again.

Nike is moving the internet as a weapon, getting online and offline, allowing more small partners to engage in physical activity. This is Nike's O2O.

Changing sports and spending habits

In the eyes of many domestic peers, Nike's ongoing internet and digital strategy is a thankless task, as these efforts do not directly boost Nike's sales, and Huang, the communications director of Nike Greater China, admits that Nike itself does not expect these efforts to directly boost sales growth.

So why would Nike do that?

To understand the significance behind Nike's digital strategy, it is important to understand the major environmental changes facing the sporting goods market. The root cause of the industry-wide recession in the past 3 years has been a change in people's consumption and exercise habits.

In the Chinese market for 20 years, the line between sports and fashion brands is rather vague. Especially in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the concept of the Olympic Games, the people's enthusiasm for sports, sports brands Day is also quite moist.

However, many people have overlooked the point is that, in the prevailing market environment, consumers buy sports brand products, not because of good sports habits, a pair of sneakers and sportswear may be his main work and daily life dress. For these consumers, buy a sportswear and buy a casual outfit essence is no different, just because of the impact of the great environment at that time, many people in imperceptible will be more inclined to buy sports brand products.

With the end of the Beijing Olympic Games, sports brands in China's good days have come to an end. The rise in national income has led to a breakdown in consumer demand for clothing, and consumers have become increasingly "fastidious". In the first-line market, sportswear is no longer a part of the consumer's daily wear, the rising fast fashion brand quickly diverted the original sports brand customer groups.

This change in consumption habits eventually led to an imbalance between supply and demand in the sporting goods market, followed by a 3-year recession in the industry.

However, this round of recession is not all bad, waves of sand, help sports brands to screen out the real core of the sports consumer population. While the overall demand for sporting goods is seemingly declining, at the same time, in the one or two-line city, more and more white-collar workers begin to focus on their health and begin to consciously and systematically participate in the movement.

The following example may help you to better understand what is going on in China's Sporting goods market: 10 million of the people who bought the sports brand originally, but only 1 million of them really have sports habits and sports needs. Now, due to market segmentation and other reasons, the sports brand's consumer population dropped to 5 million, but, among them, a good exercise habits of users accounted for 2 million.

So, for the sports brand to say, the challenge that is facing now actually has two points, one is how to serve these higher-gold movement crowd. Second, how to expand the core movement of the population base. Nike chooses to use the Internet as a weapon to meet these challenges.

"Nike is not necessarily able to go to every city to open a shop, but such a platform can bring Nike to every consumer." and bring every consumer to us. "Nike is a company with young people as its main market, so it's important to learn to communicate with them in a young way," Huang said. ”

On the day of "double 11" Nike launched a low-key public service account Nike run Club for running people on Twitter. Just 10 days into the line, the account for running enthusiasts has attracted 16,124 followers, with the built-in run-team features built into the account, which quickly created more than 1000 running-themed micro-groups.

Borrowing force micro-trust public number

Nike has always been an innovative enterprise, and it has been a technical guide to the development of the industry over the past 30 years. Now that the company is no longer content to sell a pair of sneakers to consumers, it is starting to set a bigger mission for itself-to help users move more scientifically and systematically.

"In addition to providing products, what we want to do now is actually to provide services." The so-called service, is to let users of the brand and sports awareness more complete. "Huang the significance of Nike to business value."

For a sports brand, to achieve the above goals, then the prerequisite is to understand how their users in the end is how to exercise.

In the past 3 years, Nike has launched a number of quantitative user movement products: in 2010 launched for the running mobile phone application nike+running,2011 years, with TomTom Company launched a GPS-enabled sports watch, last year, Nike even launched a wear equipment- Athletic wrist band FuelBand, this October, and further released a second-generation product--fuelband SE, which also marks the FuelBand was included in the regular product line Nike; In early November, Nike targeted the iphone 5s built-in M7 Dynamic collaborative processor tailor-made daily activity record application Nike move also officially landed in the app Store.

When the real-world movement data is quantified to the virtual world, Nike can begin to more efficiently guide users to participate in the movement. Through the mechanism of medal incentive, Nike can make the user's movement become more systematic and regular, the user can also understand his daily movement situation at a glance.

But it's not enough that Nike wants to regain ground in the Chinese market and try to reignite consumer enthusiasm. Nike hopes to achieve this through "social" means.

Just as there is an opinion leader who can lead public opinion at the level of information dissemination, in the world of movement, there is also a movement in the social circle of everyone. Nike hopes to focus on these sports talent and bring more people in the circle of friends into the game.

The use of social media and tools for marketing has long been nothing new, and in overseas markets Nike has long nike+running its core offerings to social products such as Facebook and Twitter, where users can share their sports records in social media after the campaign ends. In China, the alternative to international social media is Sina Weibo and QQ space. Pan Shiyi is probably the most famous nike+running user in China, and in the past two years Mr. Pan has been a frequent performer of his running on Weibo, becoming the unofficial designated spokesperson for Nike.

However, sharing their running results is only a fairly rudimentary means, with the decline of microblogging activity, Nike began to explore new ways, this micro-trust platform on the Nike Run Club public account was born in this context.

This is not the first time Nike is based on micro-credit promotion, more than a year ago, Nike had opened its own public account, but the push of branded news and product information was never a Nike-branded user interface, so Nike has been looking for a way to promote its own brand of micro-credit. Nike's digital marketing team finally found inspiration until micro-letter 5.0 made a full upgrade to the public service account.

In recent years, running has quickly been popular among white-collar groups in China's first-tier cities. All kinds of running organizations are also emerging, not only the major sports brands have set up running clubs, even some traditional enterprises are involved in it, Vanke, Lenovo's internal running has been a considerable scale.

But apart from these organizations with corporate backgrounds, Nike is hoping that more ordinary people will be able to participate, and that the micro-letter group feature is a great opportunity for Nike's Nike Run Club account, where users can find their way around the running group and get more like-minded people to run.

In addition to running the public account, it is reported that Nike is still in the midst of the busy planning basketball public service account.

For most people, running is a relatively independent exercise, and it doesn't take a lot of people to get it done. But basketball is different. In most cases, this is an activity that requires the participation of many people. For many fans, it is a headache to organize small partners to play a game, because it is difficult to gather the right numbers. Nike's digital marketing team is discussing the use of micro-letter group functions to help users solve the problem.

The essence of Nike O2O is that it attracts more users to participate, and then interacts with data and social interactions to create user stickiness, which allows users to complete the Nike platform.

The real potential of the Nike platform

Today we are familiar with the domestic and foreign front-line sports brands have at least 20 years of history. But in the past few decades, no sports brand has ever really understood its own consumers, and even though many companies have commissioned third-party agencies to conduct various types of user research each year, the number of samples and information available is fairly limited.

When a pair of running shoes is sold, it has nothing to do with the brand company, and no one knows how they use them after they buy the product, whether it's a daily dress or a real daily run. Even if you can infer from the frequency of repeated purchases that a consumer is not a sports habit, but what is his sports habits, the brand still do not know.

But for Nike, through the continuous force on the Internet product, it is actually understanding the user's exercise habits, including the user's movement frequency, time, and location information. There is a great deal of value hidden in these figures.

First of all, it can be in the future to achieve more accurate advertising, large amount of users must be the core of the sports crowd, the demand for sporting goods is also more exuberant. In fact, the current nike+running products have been disguised as such a function. Users can mark their own shoes after each run, and when a pair of running shoes has run over 300〜500 kilometers, the functionality will be greatly reduced, that is, it is time to buy new shoes.

Secondly, from the user's movement of geographical information, you can find out which areas of the movement of people relatively concentrated, so that in the future Nike will be able to open the information to its own agents, optimize the location of the agency's stores, and guide them in the area of the movement of people focused on regular promotional activities.

Again, the user's movement data can help designers and product managers design products that are more tailored to the needs of consumers. The Nike running shoes product director said in an interview with business value that they learned from Nike that a large number of users were running at night, so they added more reflective material to the product. Imagine, in the future, Nike will be able to allocate its capacity more efficiently and lay out its products in different regions of the store, as Nike becomes more aware of the user's height and weight. In the future, the embarrassment of looking at a product in a store without the right size will never be the same.

From a more macro point of view, it could even help Nike predict the market's trend when Nike's user size increased further. At present, the Nike community's global registered users have reached 18 million, through a certain mathematical model, Nike can actually understand the changes in user movement. For example, when the total amount of user movement is reduced, it should be appropriate to control capacity, and put more resources in marketing.

These are not all far-fetched fantasies, and quite a few of them are indeed occurring or will soon be achieved, but for Nike, it is not enough to advertise their methodology with rivals at this stage.

From the Internet's point of view, what Nike is doing is actually building a low-level sports ecosystem, helping more consumers develop sports habits and making sports truly an integral part of people's lives. This is not just for Nike itself, but for the long run, the industry will enjoy the benefits of Nike's internet strategy.