AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

The Nike Training Club studio: A personal, reciprocal and ongoing customer journey:

by S. Tu




Institution: Delft University of Technology
Department:
Year: 2014
Keywords: brand marketing; customer journey; strategy
Record ID: 1255762
Full text PDF: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1385af79-0a5c-45fe-b139-38f2ca9b68fc


Abstract

Since 2011, in terms of Women’s training business, Nike has relied upon a brand tool called Nike Training Club (NTC). This brand tool has evolved from a fitness phone application to a complete ecosystem that encompasses for instance the NTC trainers, the NTC social media channels and the NTC fitness classes. Following the expansion of this brand tool, the first European NTC studio opened its doors in February 2014. Having in mind the expansion of this concept to key European cities, Nike commissioned this project in order to redesign it into a financially sustainable project. However, we challenged this brief based on a throughout analysis. Indeed, during the evaluation of the NTC studio, the 6 interviews conducted with studio users revealed that the studio was only a free and basic functional training space – and therefore did not increase the brand equity. We thus argued that the studio’s function should be rethought even before thinking about its expansion. In order to redefine the core function of the studio, we conducted a company, a competitor, a trend, and a customer analysis, which resulted in four main strategic directions for Nike and the studio: Nike should build a true and unique club of girls that focus on training, running and active living with Nike+ as the membership. The studio should become more than a training space, but their own clubhouse where all the members feel connected to each other and Nike. Nike should rely with parsimony on trials and education to demonstrate the performance and innovation of its products. The variety of classes available at the studio should highly reflect the 3 silos: studio, High Intensity Training and gym. Nike should offer elevated and desirable experience around live classes lead by NTC trainers. This experience should be more than its training function: it should strengthen the bond between the studio users but also between them and Nike. The studio should drive business to cover its high financial investment, but should not become a classic retail space: the studio should drive traffic to the store using the omni-channel retail model and relying on social shopping behavior. We then combined these four directions into a new design brief that stressed the new goals of the studio: the NTC studio should be redesigned into an elevated training space dedicated for a community of girls – who run, train and live – that drives business. In this interest, we set a new vision: a personal, reciprocal and ongoing journey, which was conceptualized into three stages. The first stage consisted in shifting the core function of the studio from a training space to community space. Since the community would be at the center of the redesigned studio, the initial step of the concept consisted in defining this community. As we identified that the current studio users were part of a Nike run club of girls who also train and live actively, the identity of this club was updated as running, training and living community and had the studio space redesigned for them. Not only we proposed a…