The hardest thing for athletes is staying committed to their goals.

So we created Nike On Demand: a human-driven, bot-free 1:1 mobile messenger-based service that keeps athletes engaged over time by getting to know them personally, serving up bespoke content and connecting them with Nike trainers, coaches, etc.

In conversations that went on for weeks, we made the most of mobile messaging platforms’ functionalities, delivering personalized calls to action, images, soundbites, videos, etc. Users responded in kind, telling us personal stories about their lives and the motivations behind their goals and sending us emojis, screengrabs of their accomplishments, even photos!

And because the service was human-driven, not the stale messages of a chat bot, we were able to send wake-up messages that got athletes out of bed, reminders that got athletes to the gym, messages that changed behavior.

For 6 weeks, inside the Nike On Demand Service Centre, Nike experts, coaches, trainers, nutritionists, etc. cross-referenced motivational messages with users’ activity to determine which nudges saw the greatest behavior change.

The qualitative messaging sentiment and quantitative activity data gathered during service hours was analyzed twice daily, with teams in the US working though the European night to turn around actionable insights for the morning shift.

These insights then formed the basis of bespoke motivation (e.g. personal voice messages from coaches) and individual training or nutrition plans, with the Nike experts tapping into the entire Nike ecosystem to serve up the perfect Nike services (e.g. getting a user into the backdoor of a sold out Nike Training Club class), experiences (e.g. a private 1:1 training session with a professional athlete) and products (e.g. a trial of the right footwear) to keep the athlete on track.

Over 6 weeks, Nike On Demand enabled 240 athletes to take their game to the next level, exchanging over 22K messages and connecting athletes with pacers, trainers, run coaches, reminders, private classes, 1:1 sessions, training plans, playlists, app challenges, product trials, VIP bookings, coaching tips, and a whole heap of ass-kicking motivation.

Here’s what users thought:

83% would recommend Nike On Demand to a friend.

81% would use the service again.

70% expect this type of service from Nike.

Athletes referred to Nike On Demand as their “guilty conscience” and their “workout buddy”.

By the end of the campaign, it was like saying goodbye to a friend: “No! You can’t go!”

Nike On Demand is a mechanism for producing a response, building relationships and influencing ongoing consumer behavior in a way that nobody has ever done before.

It leveraged mobile messaging platforms to create and enhance deep personal relationships with consumers.

The more we learned about users, the more tailored our calls to action became and the more effective they were.

We challenged all Nike members in Berlin to unleash their potential.

More than we could support answered the call.

Users’ qualitative messaging sentiment and quantitative activity data were aggregated and analyzed twice daily, and the insights gleaned from these analyses then enabled Nike experts to provide each user with highly effective motivational content, tailored for them personally.

We built rich profiles for each individual user based on our conversations and their activity so that Nike experts could provide them with 100% personal advice and different experts could seamlessly pick up a friendly conversation where another had left off without the user even noticing.

We got to know them individually and so our calls to action became more and more personalized; both in form (e.g. if they used emojis, we used emojis) and content (e.g. run challenges tailored to their level and goals).

In Germany, Nike was seen as a cool product brand, not as a performance partner. So Nike’s objective was to disrupt the marketplace by serving athletes like never before in Adidas’ stronghold of Berlin.

At the same time, we were witnessing a significant audience migration away from public social media-based conversations to the closed world of private messaging: e.g. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. This was particularly pronounced in Germany, where privacy is paramount.