Imagine a world where the app on your smart phone wakes you up at the “perfect time” for your morning run, taking into consideration how you slept, what your fitness goals are and what time your first meeting starts so you get your work out in. Imagine during the run, your watch would send you breathing tips to maximize the workout and that your vitals were tracked from the shirt you were wearing. Imagine all this data being available to you after your run and being able to share it with your trainer or doctor or even co-workers you were competing against in a fitness challenge. Imagine your app or smart watch alerting you your shoes are pretty worn after many months of morning runs and ordering your next pair for delivery that day, also demonstrating options for you to donate your used shoes.
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This is what Under Armour calls the “Art of the Possible”, and they presented this vision at SAP’s Art of the Possible Tour in New York City last week. The global retailer stressed that a key part of their core mission is taking data and bringing value to it for their athletes and customers. They call this “Connected Fitness” and they’ve completely revamped their digital strategy in the last years to drive this mission. Three years ago their digital strategy consisted of a single Web site. Now the company has 25+ e-commerce sites globally with plans to launch more this year.
Under Armour describes how they partnered with SAP several years ago and how it began with Design Thinking. Design Thinking is a proven methodology for problem solving intended to clear the clutter and focus on things that add value to the consumer. It uses empathy to help people achieve extraordinary results. Both companies came together to think through ways data could create value for Under Armour and it’s millions of global athletes.
The more Under Armour knows about its customer’s fitness habits and health, the better it can serve them. They are building, in partnership with SAP, what they call the single view of the consumer, which enables more personalized information for every consumer, and as a result, will open up many opportunities to improve the customer experience. This is big data turned Smart data, creating value for consumers and improving people’s lives.
From The Gear To The Ice
The NHL also talked about how having access to a “bazooka of data” is increasing engagement for the league and for its fans.
“We have 98 years,” Chris Foster, Director of Digital Business Development for the NHL, said. “We have a long standing history and a long history of data. SAP helps us take this data, make sense out of it and understand our fans better.” Foster also spoke at SAP’s event last week.
The NHL’s Art of the Possible is around player and puck tracking in the future to track mountains of data. They’re also going back 100 years. “We’re taking all the game sheets since 1917 and digitizing it,” Foster said. “Imagine every game since 1917, our entire history, having interactive digital tools and stats available for fans.”
For the NHL, engaging fans is their #1 goal. Like Under Armour, the NHL and SAP engaged in design thinking to go deep into the organization, understand the challenges and come up with a wish list of different ways to engage fans. Some of the things they did revolves around stats and changing how stats are presented to fans, making them “less scary” – by changing colors, adding pictures, giving milestones per player, having an interactive leader board, including video and infographics. As a result, the NHL saw 25% more site visits, 45% more time spent on site by fans and 30% more overall fan engagement.
When it comes to data processing, or speed, the NHL is aiming tod o data smarter and faster with SAP HANA, giving fans the ability to query all sorts of stats with advanced filtering. “What we want to avoid was the spinning wheel,” Foster said. “You know. That circle that comes up when you put something in your search and it takes a while to think? We want to avoid that and thanks to SAP HANA, which processes information at incredible speeds, we can.” Foster also stressed that reliability of stats was important and the league is using predictive analytics to create stories, predict playoffs, and conduct bracket challenges among others.