Adidas wants to know more about users preparing to put an NFC chip in their sneakers
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Not long after Apple launched the wearable device Apple Watch, the practicability and popularity of the product have yet to be tested by the market. However, sports giant Adidas (Adidas) seems to have decided to emulate this kind of technology products, it intends to combine technology and lifestyle into products.
On March 16, at the SXSW Art Festival (an annual event in the United States involving product exchanges in the field of art and technology) held in Texas, USA, Jon Werner, ADI’s product innovation expert, said: , Adi will implant NFC (near filed communications) chips in all its shoes, apparel and sports equipment to facilitate the establishment of interaction between users and brands.
Adi’s primary function of implanting NFC technology into products is to collect more user information. Simply put, Adi hopes to further understand who is wearing their sneakers. “We want to change the practice of collecting customer data from e-commerce sites to having NFC technology embedded in every product that can help us understand when, where and how the wearer uses the product. These are more specific and individual The data will provide predictable information for brand sales and product production teams,” Jon Warner said. As for the specific aspects of these customer data, Adidas officials did not make it clear.
Adidas said that it will also recommend suitable new products to customers through NFC technology to “induce” continuous consumption. Adidas will analyze the collected personalized data, and combine with the smartphone application to match and push the most suitable products for users. Jon Warner said that Adi’s product recommendations will be closely related to the user’s personal situation, for example, they will not recommend a sweater to a friend in the tropics.
However, there is still a lack of mature big data analysis systems on the market. Can Adi ensure that its product recommendations will hit users’ pain points? Users’ preferences and habits are far more complex and personalized than those simple data, which means Adi needs to maintain a fairly high quality in user analytics. If you can’t push valuable product pairings, users will delete Adidas like they treat annoying app pushes.
Of course, Adi’s NFC technology has more practical uses. When consumers enter the physical store to shop, they touch the mobile phone to the NFC tag of the product, and they can immediately see the relevant product information and user feedback of the product. “The idea of presenting product information like this is to ensure that consumers have complete and consistent product information before purchasing, as different store associates may present you with different content,” explains Jon Warner.
In addition, this function design for viewing product information also takes into account another important issue – if the mobile phone cannot display the product information after touching the NFC tag, it means that the pair of shoes may be non-genuine. In the face of the current situation that fake sports brands are full of street goods, this function is likely to be sought after by the public.
In addition to the above functions related to product promotion, Adi also hopes to change the payment channel through NFC – when the user decides to buy a certain product, the product information display on the mobile phone can jump to the NFC purchase channel, and directly realize fast payment, with Avoid the hassle of queuing in store to pay. But whether consumers are happy with this payment method is still unknown. Apple has also vigorously promoted the NFC payment method of Apple Pay before, but the effect is not obvious.
In fact, Adi applied this technology to the Boost series running shoes in 2013, but only for consumers in some parts of the United States. Moreover, its functions are relatively limited. Users can only read product information and evaluate the purchased products through NFC mobile phones.
This time, Adi will fully launch NFC technology on footwear products, and will take the lead in applying it to two series of sports shoes, Stan Smith and Superstar. For clothing products, Adidas said that it has no plans to launch it, but this technology is likely to be applied to professional players’ jerseys.willNFCThe combination of wearable technology and professional ball games is likely to bring some changes to professional sports events, but Adi has not disclosed relevant functional ideas to the outside world.
Jon Warner said that if users are willing to use NFC, Adi expects to have more than one billion user touch points, which means that brands have more opportunities and channels to face consumers than ever before. In the increasingly competitive sporting goods market, the shelf space in stores continues to shrink, and major sports brands are exploring emerging channels.
Adidas, in particular, had a bad year in 2014. Adi’s financial report shows that in fiscal 2014, the group’s gross profit margin fell by 1.7%, and from September to December last year, the group’s total loss reached 140 million euros (about 927 million yuan), exceeding 2013. 10 million euros (about 66 million yuan) in the same period last year.
This time, Adi has incorporated mobile and app technology into its marketing, which it hopes will bring some changes and challenge Nike’s dominance – but Adi’s own answer.
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