Nike Membership Insights
Nike Membership Insights
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Our long-standing client Nike trusted us, once again, with deep diving into the very nature, meaning and communication consequences of brand membership. What actually is membership in branding and advertising contexts? How can we best define it? And what are the implications in terms of communication angles, channel management, user experience as well as the handling of data, privacy, and transparency?
The objective was to recruit 24 young adults, both Nike members and non-Nike members with an affinity to the brand though, to bring them, in different compositions, to a table and engage with them on the overarching issue of membership. Instead of reproducing known assumptions on these topics, we aimed at the uncompromised views and perspectives of the younger generation.
We have been even more proud of Nike’s anew confidence given that the brand is well-known for their high standards and expectations on participants’ profiles in the context of qualitative market research.
Methodology
Together with these young adults, we dealt with different approaches to subscription and membership models, but also with the notion and meaning of digital communities – being buzz words, that virtually every modern brand has been trying to build on in some way or the other.
In multiple, both age- and gender-mixed focus groups, we intensively examined what qualities express membership for them, how they as (potential) members wished to be addressed and talked with, and what it takes from their point of view to create resonating member-to-member, Nike-to-member, and member-to-Nike experiences.
Output
The insights that we could successfully generate within the focus groups stood for themselves thanks to their diverse, unique, and differentiating nature. Yet, they were also meant as both valuable input and localizing springboards for developing robust interview guidelines for subsequent quantitative studies.
In this light, we initiated a data merger workshop together with our client Nike to jointly screen the generated qualitative data and to decide on the key thematic blocks and take-aways. This process allowed us not only to identify and formulate, based on the recurring main themes, strong hypotheses for the subsequent quantitative study, but also to prepare the final presentation in the most efficient way. Since we discovered our client’s main priorities, also in regard to framing, wording and visualizing, during this data merger workshop, we could provide them with a tailor-made, perfectly matching insights report.
This mission for Nike served as a great reminder of the universal importance to first run qualitative investigations even if you wish to have more quantitative data about your consumer. Without identifying core themes and theses that appear truly relevant to your (potential) target customer in the first place, you won’t produce questionnaires that bring about supporting data and significant results that will actually reflect your (future) communities’ state of mind.
