Nike Internet Strategy To Change Circles

O2O, namely Online To Offline (offline / offline to offline), refers to combining offline business opportunities with the Internet and making the Internet the front desk for offline pactions. The concept originated from the United States.

The concept of O2O is very extensive. It can be both online and offline, and can be commonly referred to as O2O.

After 2010, the domestic sporting goods market suffered a whole industry recession.

The problem of inventory has plagued almost every company in the industry.

No exception.

However, although cleaning up inventory and channel adjustment has caused every enterprise to be battered, Nike is still free to push forward another important work, that is to promote its own digital sports platform Nike+.

2013 is the year when Nike's digitalization strategy took root in China.

Nike began to vigorously promote its digital platform Nike+ in large and small offline activities.

After nearly a year's efforts, Nike's digital platform has experienced explosive growth.

The exclusive data obtained by reporters showed that as of October this year, in the Greater China market, the number of registrations in the Nike+ online community increased by 130% compared with last year, and the application downloads of Nike's mobile terminals increased from 570 thousand last year to 2 million 580 thousand, an increase of 350%.

Nike is using the mobile Internet as a weapon to get online and offline, so that more partners can participate in sports activities in person.

This is the O2O of Nike.

Changing sports and consumption habits

In the eyes of many domestic peers, Nike's implementation of the Internet and digital strategy is a thankless task, because these efforts can not directly promote Nike's sales, and Nike's Greater China Communications Director Huang Xiangyan also admitted to reporters that Nike itself did not expect these efforts to directly boost sales growth.

So why did Nike do it? Answer: changes in people's consumption and exercise habits.

Over the past 20 years, the boundaries between sports brand and fashion brand in Chinese market are rather vague.

Consumers buy sports brand products, not because they have good sports habits, buying a sportswear and buying a casual wear nature is no different, simply because of the impact of the prevailing environment, many people will be more inclined to buy sports brand products in the subtle.

{page_break}

With the end of the Beijing Olympic Games, the good days of sports brands in China have come to an end.

The rise of national income leads to the breakdown of clothing demand of consumers. Sportswear is no longer a part of consumers' daily wear. The rising fast fashion brand quickly diverts the original customer groups belonging to sports brands.

This change in consumption habits has finally led to the imbalance between supply and demand in the sporting goods market, followed by a 3 year long recession in the whole industry.

However, this round of recession is not a bad thing. It will help the sports brands to select the real core sports consumers.

Although the overall demand for sports products is on the decline, at the same time, in the second tier cities, more and more white-collar workers begin to pay attention to their health and begin to participate systematically in sports consciously.

The following examples may help you better understand the changes that are going on in the Chinese sporting goods market.

The population is 10 million, but only 1 million people actually have exercise habits and sports needs.

Today, due to market segmentation and other reasons, the consumption of sports brand has dropped to 5 million, but 2 million of them have good exercise habits.

Therefore, for sports brands, there are two challenges to be faced at the moment. One is how to serve the sports population with higher gold content.

The two is how to expand the viscosity of core players, and then interact with data and social interaction, so that users can complete the precipitation on the Nike+ platform. This is the essence of Nike O2O.

The real potential of Nike+ platform

There are at least 20 year old sports brands that are familiar to us both at home and abroad.

But in the past few decades, no sports brand has ever really understood its consumers. Even though many companies entrust third party organizations to conduct various types of user surveys every year, the amount and information they can collect are very limited.

After a pair of running shoes are sold, they have nothing to do with the Brand Company. No one knows how users use these products after they buy them, whether they are for everyday wear or are they really used to run everyday.

Even though it is possible to deduce whether a consumer has the habit of exercise through repeated purchase frequency, but what is his exercise habit, the brand still does not know.

But for Nike, through continuous efforts on Internet products, it is truly understanding user's exercise habits, including user's movement frequency, movement time, location information and so on.

These data are of great value.

{page_break}

First of all, it can achieve more accurate advertising in the future.

A large number of users must be the core sports population, and the demand for sports goods is also more vigorous.

In fact, the product of Nike+Running now exists in disguised form.

Users can mark their shoes after each run. When a pair of running shoes has run 300/500 kilometers, the functionality will be greatly reduced, that is, when it comes to buying new shoes.

Secondly, we can find out which regions are relatively concentrated from the geographic information of users.

In the future, Nike can open this information to its agents, optimize the location of the agents' stores, and guide them to organize regular promotional activities in the areas where the sports people are concentrated.

Thirdly, user's motion data can help designers and product managers to design products that are more responsive to consumer needs.

The product director of Nike running shoes said in an interview that they learned from Nike+ that a large number of users were running at night, so they would add more reflective materials on the product.

Imagine that in the future, with Nike's further understanding of user's height and weight, and with the location information of user movement, Nike will be able to allocate its capacity more effectively and lay products in stores in different regions.

In the future, the embarrassment of seeing a product in a shop but not suitable for its own size will be gone forever.

From a more macro perspective, one day, when the Nike+ user scale increases further, it can even help Nike predict the trend of the market.

At present, the Nike+ community has registered 18 million users globally. Nike can actually understand changes in user movement through a certain mathematical model.

For example, when the total amount of user movement decreases, we should appropriately control the production capacity and invest more resources in marketing.

These are not all unreachable fantasies, and quite a few of them are indeed happening or will soon be realized. For Nike, at the moment, it is still at a stage of choking and becoming rich, and there is no need to publicize its methodology with the opponents.

From the perspective of the Internet, what Nike is doing at present is actually building a sports ecosystem at the bottom, helping more consumers develop exercise habits and making sports become an indispensable part of people's lives.

Such a move is not only beneficial to Nike itself. In the long run, the whole industry can enjoy Nike.

Welfare brought by strategy.