UA'S Strategy To Beat Adidas

and

Two sporting goods producers, one is the world giant, and one is a new star.

But since 2014, Under Armour defeated Adidas in the US market and occupied the United States

After the second market, Under Armour has suddenly become a hot topic of discussion in the market. With its myths in recent years, its share price has soared, and the limelight has not been two.

Underdog strategy of Under Armour

In recent years, many people have talked about what kind of company Under Armour is. Why can they beat Adidas and attack the throne of Nike? Many articles compare the advertising strategies, spokesmen and investment value of the two companies. Quite a few people think that Underdog Strategy of Under Armour is their success.

How should we understand this strategy?

Source: Adweek - Adrienne Lofton

On different occasions, the company considers the Under Armour brand as a "Underdog Brand", so on the choice of spokesperson, it tends to choose some athletes who do not have the chance to be selected for the first time but strive to strive for the ideal every day. She said on a visit: "it is a kind of sports slogan of" the people who are trying to fight for the ideal. "Under Armour is responsible for Adrienne Lofton, senior vice president of Global Brand Marketing.

The first African American woman Ballet Troupe Misty Copeland and supermodel Gisele Bundchen are advertised by a series of I Will What I Want by Under Armour, which is to publicize this spirit.

The evaluation of "You have the wrong body for ballet" is undoubtedly a considerable blow to the 13 year old Misty Copeland.

Give up or stick to training and go towards your dream? Misty Copeland chooses the latter.

Similarly, Gisele Bundchen, a supermodel, has been criticized by the public for every word and action. She always cares about others' opinions or insists on doing herself well? Gisele Bundchen chooses the latter.

Nike "Just Do it" emphasizes "ignoring others, believing in oneself, proving that one's decision is right", while Under Armour focuses on "proving that others are wrong in their own efforts", though the same way, but the difference is very subtle.

Under Armour, by passing this information, further strengthens the brand's professional image (with good product help, can get twice the result with half the effort), and at the same time arouses the public's sympathy and recognition for the challenger.

The marketing of sporting goods has long been in the era of emotional marketing. The founder of Phil, Knight, Under, said in his book "SHOE DOG: A Memoir by the by", that he never believed in advertising, and attached importance to the connection between sports spirit and brand. In history, there was another guy who had been dismissed because he insisted on putting the product into advertising. From the early years, he only focused on people's running pictures, to the first advertisement in the series of the first year of the series, showing the love of running by the old man in front of the camera and not seeing half of the products. Good products are important (Under Armour products).

Under Armour has taken a step forward. After that, should we catch up with that direction?

Connected Fitness- surpasses the community to create a healthy sports ecosystem.

Since 2013, Under Armour has vigorously entered the sports health APP market, first acquiring MapMyFitness, and then bringing Endomondo and MyFitnessPal to its flag.

I looked at these actions, and I was thinking that, although more and more people focused on health and exercise, wearable device and APP APP were also numerous, and APP was often used with device.

A person who buys smart watches of FITBIT or Polar will definitely use their APP. I believe that with the popularity of wearable smart devices, there will be fewer and fewer users of APP that do not have hardware matching, and Under Armour does not manufacture hardware itself. What is the purpose of acquiring these companies? To buy users who love sports and health, to create communities, to provide value-added services for users of Under Armour, to increase user stickiness and to understand the demand of products by using big data? I think Under Armour is the ultimate goal of building a strong ecosystem with sports and health as its core.

But before that, let's take a look at what businesses the acquired companies are doing.

Under Armour how to construct Connected Fitness ecosystem step by step

MapMyFitness - MapMyFitness, which has about 35 million users, is headquartered in Austin, Texas, USA. It has MapMyFitness, MapMyRun, MapMyRide, MapMyHike and MapMyWalk mobile applications, and its staff number is about more than 100.

In addition to mobile APP, it also provides cloud services to enable users to upload their motion data to the Internet.

Since its establishment in 2007, it has operated in an open platform mode, supporting over more than 400 health trackers and wearable smart devices.

Users can download the mobile phone APP for free, and they can also pay to join their MVP members (about US $29.99 per year), including value-added services such as heart rate analysis, personalized training programs, voice coaching and so on.

{page_break}

Endomondo – headquartered in Copenhagen, the company has about 20 million users of mobile APP Endomondo.

Like MapMyFitness, it operates in an open platform mode, supports other health trackers, wearable smart devices, users can download and use freely, and can also pay as Premium members to enjoy its value-added services.

Under Armour is believed to be more than 80% of non US regional users.

Unlike MyFitnessPal, MyFitnessPal and MapMyFitness, Endomondo is a tool that helps users build healthy lives through calorie counting and dietary tracking.

It has about 100 million users, and tracked food items up to 5 million million. Many users use it to record their diet, improve their health and even lose weight. They are the most important members of the Under Armour sports health ecosystem.

The three stage is to build a healthy sports ecosystem.

Phase one: expand community and user data interoperability

Community: to build a sports healthy big circle, the first thing to do is to build a community with common interests. For Under Armour, sports enthusiasts, professional sportsman and healthy friends are the targets.

When a mature community needs to be built, Under Armour wants to own its own community in a short time. The only way is through acquisition.

Most of the MapMyFitness users are in the United States, while Endomondo users are concentrated in Europe, and the two complement each other. In addition, MyFitnessPal contributes a large number of users who focus on healthy life. The community of the 150 million users not only quickly formed, but also strengthened the penetration of Under Armour into Europe.

Another point is that in order to have a healthy life, sports and healthy eating are necessary. Sports lovers should be more concerned about their health and eating habits.

Conversely, those who pay attention to healthy diet tend to do more exercise and keep healthy.

Therefore, after Under Armour acquired these companies, they set up a brand for UA, and crossed propaganda on UI set. As a result, the download rate showed a high growth rate in a short time, attracting one million new users every eight days on average.

With the global vision of Under Armour, we will not rule out the acquisition of mature APP in Asia, Africa or China, and make up for the missing communities and data.

Data Interchange: with the community, the next step is to link these communities together so that information can be circulated in these communities.

Why do we do this? What are the advantages?

The ethnicity of sports and healthy diet management is actually two completely different communities. For Under Armour, the value of the community lies not in the community itself, but in the ecosphere of the community.

Just like people living in different areas, if they are not connected by means of pportation, they have no chance to exchange visits / interact with each other, and have no chance to know the advantages of each other's communities.

From the perspective of regional development, besides the building, traffic arrangements, hydropower and coal facilities are also basic requirements. The next step is the basic function and equipment of the community, such as sports grounds, parks, hospitals and so on. The next step may be the formation of a community with its own characteristics through the inducement of policies.

The step that Under Armour does is to change the UI of each APP first, add other APP information in different places, so that users can access other APP quickly and directly, and encourage downloading. On the other hand, users who are using these APP can freely output their data and input them to APP on other UA to achieve data interoperability.

Take Under Armrour's APP "Record" as an example, you can directly connect and use user's data in MyFitnessPal, and even Profile Profile data can be shared by one key.

This approach has the following advantages at least.

Increasing the exposure rate of APP for each Under Armour will attract more people to download.

More accurately grasp the user's Atlas, in the future, you can easily search for the users you need.

Generally, such as MapMyFitness, MapMyRun, MapMyRide, Endomondo and other sports APP, there is no rigid requirement for users to input detailed personal data.

Take MapMyFitness for example, although it guides users to fill in data such as sex, age, height, weight, date of birth, location, etc., but users are mainly used to track data during their exercise, and there is no incentive to fill in the true and correct data (of course privacy is one of the considerations).

Although the built-in social media sharing function will help encourage users to enter real names and understand their social profiles, if Under Armour uses these data alone to track or judge users' habits and trends, it will easily lead to misjudgement.

In this way, it is necessary to combine the third party data and make use of the mature Data Management Platform to improve the accuracy.

However, this practice not only increases the cost but also costs manpower and time.

How to accurately grasp user data? Acquisition of MyFitnessPal is an important step, because gender, age, height, weight and other factors are directly related to the health of users. For example, the accurate height, weight, sex and other data are very important when evaluating body fat ratio, so users will input accurate personal data.

Connecting MyFitnessPal to other UA's APP, and then account can login multiple UA APP should be the future development aspect (now only on UA Shop shopping APP), so Under Armour can accurately grasp the user's profile, facilitate the future development of online sales.

The second stage: developing smart wearable devices to get through hardware and software.

With the popularity of smart wearable devices, more and more people are shopping for these devices, and of course they will choose the APP or platform produced by the smart wearable device company, so the third party APP will survive more and more narrowly. I believe this is why Under Armour has insisted on continuing to invest in smart Wearable devices in addition to spending a lot of money on these third party APP, so as to attract more new users and obtain their usage data.

{page_break}

Of course, when we talk about new users that attract APP, we must never neglect a large group of customers who are using Under Armour products, because they are the potential users of UA APP or smart wearable devices.

They established trust in Under Armour early in the morning.

Therefore, as long as they successfully lobbying them to buy and use UA APP or smart wearable devices, the time and frequency of their UA products will increase significantly. As time goes on, their trust in UA and "Stickiness" will also greatly increase, which means that they will also increase the chances of buying Under Armour products, which is conducive to the sale of UA.

First of all, let's take a look at UA hardware ("connected products"):

UA Band accelerator (smart bracelet): monitors daily movement and sleep status, detects static heart rate, controls playing music, and checks time.

The retail price is about US $180.

UA Heart Rate e (heartbeat): the heartbeat belt worn on the chest can help detect the physical condition, heart rate and calorie consumption during exercise.

The retail price is about US $80.

UA Scale Conductive (intelligent weight lb): its design is very stylish and high-tech, with the Conductive Paint Technology, it can also measure the percentage of body fat at the same time of weighing.

In addition, the function of built in WI-FI can synchronize the data of weight change to UA Record accelerator, so that the user can use APP to understand the weight change, which is much more convenient than making Excel tables herself or entering data into APP. It is one of the device device I like very much, but the retail price is about $180, which is not cheap.

UA SpeedForm Gemini 2 Record Equipped (smart running shoes): in the running shoes, the chip is tracking the running distance, time and speed. After running, the data will be synchronized to UA Record APP by Bluetooth, so that runners can record their running data with different handsets or bracelets.

The retail price is about US $150, although it is not expensive, but I think it is not practical.

UA Headphones Wireless and UA Headphones Wireless Heart Rate (wireless headset): this wireless headset uses JBL technology, which is suitable for runners, and Heart Rate can also monitor heart rate and walk at the top of technology.

But the retail price is about US $250, slightly more expensive.

Cross industry cooperation, give full play to their respective advantages

In addition to wireless headphones and JBL cooperation, in fact, all UA hardware is not self developed, but choose to cooperate with HTC ("Designed by HTC"), smart.

First, they do not have to invest in fixed assets and do not worry about inventory. Secondly, investing in manpower and R & D investment in R&D can save energy and focus on the development of communities and ecosphere.

In terms of brand awareness, Under Armour has advantages over HTC, so it is not afraid of being tied up by HTC. HTC Under can also get into the market of sports smart wearable devices by Under Armour, and it can kill two birds with one stone.

It is worth mentioning that although Nike has cancelled the development of Fuelband in recent years, Under Armour itself wants to create an open ecosystem, which is totally different from the closed loop development of Nike. Therefore, Nike's practice has no reference to Under Armour.

Another point is that from the 2015 Envision IP LLC patent company's report, Under Armour has much less patents in smart wearable devices and Mobile Fitness than Adidas and Nike.

The production of smart wearable devices has never run out of itself.

Under Armour launched the HealthBox Rate suite, including UA Band (smart bracelet), UA Scale (intelligent weight lb) and UA Heart Rate (heartbeat band), allowing users to purchase all the above intelligent products at a preferential price.

Of course, users can also purchase different connected products individually, and free use of UA Record APP.

Hardware is also selling more hardware, without the support of the community, there is no way to highlight the value of the ecosystem.

In addition to data exchange, cross propaganda between UA's APP and smart wearable devices, UA Record by APP is a very important part of Under Armour's flagship APP! Why do we have such a statement? Because it is actually the powdered by IBM IBM, which is the main function of connecting each user and analyzing user behavior and producing useful users.

IBM Watson is a supercomputer developed by IBM, which interprets non structural information and performs in-depth analysis in natural language communication with humans.

The most powerful part is Watson, who has the ability of continuous learning and can get value and knowledge from past interactive data.

According to the introduction of IBM website, there are 90 IBM Power 750 servers and DeepQA depth analysis software behind Watson, which operate in 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 15TB, and can operate 500GB data per second, which is equivalent to 100 100 million books per second.

How does Watson work?

Under Armour and IBM cooperated with UA Record System APP application to have cognitive training system (Cognitive Coaching System), which can be analyzed according to the data of users and many similar users, such as sleeping, fitness, activities and eating, etc., providing trustworthy instruction advice, playing the role of personal health consultant, fitness coach and so on.

Just imagine that in the future, when planning sports, UA Record can immediately tell you, "with your age, age, speed and goals, we recommend that you only run three times a week in the latest month, and not more than 5 kilometers per hour."

In your physical condition, the most effective exercise time is between eight a.m. and ten p.m. or four p.m. to seven p.m.

"

Is this amazing?

{page_break}

The third stage: the last mile, combined with the sports healthy big circle and the electricity supplier.

What's the use of building such a large sports and healthy ecosystem for Under Armour? Kevin Plank has said on different occasions: "We are gonna to do a lots lots, and it has been the last thing to sell." how to effectively integrate this ecosystem and sales? The answer was first seen in the June 2016 mobile application of the mobile phone.

UA Shop is the first Under Armour based on Under Armour Connected Fitness accelerator platform, combined with shopping mobile applications.

Users can synchronize their accounts in UA Record, MapMyRun and MyFitnessPal and UA Shop (currently do not support the synchronization of MyFitnessPal and Endomondo), and then the program will make personalized suggestions and prompts to users based on user's personal data, sports records, purchase records, location and other data.

Do we really need such a close shopping service? Under Armour's press release mentioned

"Imagine that a user who lives in a warm area and uses MapMyRun when running is very likely to get information about UA CoolSwitch and running shoes (CoolSwitch Under is Base layer series of Under Armour, which can make the skin feel cool and sweat at the same time.)

"

Well, that sounds very nice, and there is also a sense of "provide you with information and suggestion at right time and when when time" intimate feeling, seems good.

Why do we choose mobile applications?

1010Data, a market research firm, conducted a study in 2015. It found that the amount of online sales of 14/15 accounted for 60% in the US market in the year of Nike, and it was far ahead of other competitors. Adidas accounted for 11% of the total second, while the Adidas Armour, which defeated Adidas as the runner up of the US sales, accounted for third of the total sales of 7% Adidas.

Under Armour's part of the business is The Adobe Online Marketing Suite. In a presentation by Success Story, the manager, who is responsible for Under Armour Armour, is referred to as "50% The".

For this number, to be honest, I feel a bit surprised.

However, to serve these loyal fans and launch UA Shop is indeed a very suitable decision. In addition, the traffic from the current Under Armour website from mobile is as high as 57%, while the income from e-commerce accounts for only about 10% of the total, and the growth space is quite large.

CEO and founder Kevin Plank's ambitions

The founder and CEO Kevin Plank are very optimistic about the prospect of electronic commerce, and think that e-commerce is the battleground where Under Armour can grow rapidly. Therefore, it not only puts forward the big circle plan of Connected Fitness, but also looks at its revenue from its revenue independently.

Why is he so attached to this piece? From March this year, when South By Southwest Interactive Festival Kevin's speech, you can learn about one or two.

He mentioned: "Our belief is data is the new oil. I think companies think", "the first, the second and the third."

The 2015 annual report shows that Under Armour has 87.2% revenue from North America and only 11.5% in other markets.

Although it won the Adidas in the US, it is still very weak in the international market, and 67% of its revenue comes from distribution (wholesale), and only 30% of direct to consumer. The distributor only has Dick "s Sporting Goods", which has already occupied the Under Armour revenue. Although there is no finer report in the annual report, it can be seen that the dependence on distributors is very strong.

Under Armour spent a lot of money to acquire these APP companies (MyFitnessPal and Endomondo only used 18% for 2014), but it can accurately reach to the group of target customers, and collect the data generated by users (data is the new). After that, it is possible to cooperate with its own stores to enhance the performance of "direct sales". Compared with the advertising fees at a high price, it may be very cost-effective to look back after these acquisitions.

Although Connected Fitness's revenue accounts for only 1.3% of Under Armour's overall revenue, its growth rate is fast, and 14/15 YOY's growth is nearly 3 times.

However, the loss of Operating income failed to break even.

In addition to expanding the user base and promoting the scheme of paying members, Under Armour has also contributed to the community of Connected Fitness, attracting other brands to advertise on it (most of the advertisements are from Google Ad Network, with lower profits). Besides the hope of reaching the balance of payments and attracting users of other brands, it is believed that this will enrich and improve Data Management Platform and increase the accuracy of future targeting.

summary

Although the strategy of Under Armour to build a sports and healthy ecosphere is very thoughtful and layout is great, but I believe they need to provide more value-added services in the future to attract users to sacrifice their privacy for personalized service.