Everyone can name successful brands that never fail to create a buzz around new product releases and command customer loyalty. Learning from how major brands craft their strategies is key to staying competitive in the marketplace. Consumer insights are key to the success of Nike, Adidas and Under Armour.
What are Consumer Insights?
Consumer insights are derived from unstructured data in the form of content users create on social media. Texts from webpages. These texts are retrieved and analyzed through opinion mining or examining the sentiment and attitudes expressed in the texts. Consumer insights software uses algorithms to assign a rating of each passage according to sentiment. These ratings or consumer insights can be processed and applied like quantitative data.
The following are examples of how major brands use consumer Insights.
How Nike Turns Valued Customers into Brand Ambassadors
Nike, synonymous with the simple yet intuitively persuasive slogan “Just Do It” and its sleek and distinctive logo is a company with a mission. In their ads, it is clear the lifestyle Nike wants to evoke and how it strives to inspire people. The brand is as much about idealism and athleticism and communicates that it is invested in its customers’ goals.
It is no surprise that Nike is a customer-centric brand. It incorporates social listening and data mining from reviews and social media posts to direct product innovation. Nike understands that today’s consumer wants to feel that a brand is a kind of partner that can help them find solutions and solve problems.
The way Nike can create a sense of partnership with consumers is through consumer insights derived from the data that they generate. Nike management describes itself as obsessed with the customer journey and it recruits its most valued, high ROI customers into brand ambassadors who will share their Nike customer experience on social media.
How Adidas Stays Connected with Customers
Adidas has invested significantly in its digital segment so it can increase its contact with customers. This creates a symbiotic relationship where the customer and brand interact through various digital touchpoints. Joseph Godsey, Global Head of Digital Brand Commerce at Adidas, said, “We want to create a consumer experience that is premium, connected and personalized.”
Also, Adidas embraces a data-driven approach to stay competitive, including telling relevant stories derived from consumer insights. The data ensures that Adidas’s stories reach customers and resonate with them. Adidas is committed to getting to know its customers on a deeper level through data and innovative features that fulfil customer expectations.
Adidas’ focus on data works hand in hand with its growth in digital. The more ways a brand can interact with a customer throughout the journey the more insights can be generated. Increased communication yields more information that can help Adidas form a clearer picture of who its customers are and what decisions they will make in the future.
Under Armour’s Single View of Customer
Under Armour not only provides athletic apparel and equipment but creates a customer lifestyle and smart innovation. Under Armour was an early mover in providing a multi-faceted customer experience through apps, smart scales and athletic shoes that provide instant feedback on distance, time, date, number of steps and duration of the workout.
An innovator in the internet of things, Under Armour’s vision is to create a “single view of customer.” It provides instant feedback which can help customers achieve their goals. At the same time, Under Armour leverages user-generated data on the internet to produce consumer insights to better understand which of these smart products are working and new features consumers want to see.
Under Armour’s advanced products, including its smart athletic shoes, and Health Box containing various connected products such as a band, a heart rate strap and a scale are linked to a UA Record or an open platform to display a comprehensive view of the user’s fitness level. This information generates personalized insights into customers’ habits and overall health. These insights detailed communication between the customer and the brand.
Learning from the Big Brands
Nike, Adidas and Under Armour understand how to stay connected with customers by providing innovative products. These companies encourage loyal customers to become brand champions and spread the word on social media and review sites. Growing the digital segments of the companies creates more opportunities for customers to interact and leave essential data.
Smart, connected products not only give customers an opportunity to observe direct feedback on a workout but can enable them to get a full picture of their fitness achievements and goals while providing the companies with opportunities for communication and deriving data for consumer insights. The result is a strategy that reflects consumer interests, preferences and needs. Companies that make the best use of consumer insights maintain a competitive edge and inspire brand loyalty.
