Nike’s wealth of athlete data showed us that the hardest thing for athletes is staying on track. So we created Nike On Demand: a data-driven human-operated 1:1 service on WhatsApp that keeps athletes engaged over time, adapts to their individual needs on the fly and connects them with the best of Nike: everything from personalized playlists to 1-on-1 training with professional athletes to VIP access to sold out Nike Training Club classes.

Inside the Nike On Demand Service Centre, Nike experts, coaches, trainers, etc. cross-referenced messages with users’ app activity data to determine which nudges saw the greatest behavior change.

An off-the-shelf platform to power our concept didn’t exist so we developed a bespoke platform that blended back-end rerouting with a front-end chat, tagging and profiling interface that sat between the human operators and WhatsApp. This enabled us to create rich personal athlete profiles and provide users with timely, individual nudges that changed their behavior.

The more athletes told us about their goals and aims (from wanting to build core strength to running a marathon) and the more we followed their activity and progression, the more we were able to create rich tailored athlete profiles and serve athletes effectively via rapid connection to the Nike ecosystem of products and services.

Nike On Demand delivered truly bespoke personal creative in the form of conversation, images, playlists, etc. 1:1 via chat and it placed Nike’s immense network of athletes, coaches, experts, clubs, experiences, etc. literally at athletes’ fingertips.

Nike On Demand used data to tailor:

Bespoke training plans;

Personal advice from elite coaches and athletes;

Meaningful reminders;

Motivating kicks in the ass;

Personal congratulations;

And general chit chat, refined through agile multivariate testing;

All delivered on their terms, through chat.

This gave Nike the ability to talk to individuals like individuals, and create output that was truly unique and human. No generic drills, attaboys or badges. No two conversations were the same. And each interaction was more effective than the last.

From the consumer’s perspective, they chat with Nike on WhatsApp and get help from someone who knows them personally and who does everything in Nike’s power to help them crush their goals: everything from setting up 1-on-1 training with professional athletes to getting them in the backdoor of sold out Nike Training Club sessions.

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.

83% would recommend Nike On Demand to a friend.

81% would use the service again.

70% expect this type of service from Nike.

Nike are scaling this service, by blending machine learning with human responses, so we can serve more athletes as individuals, with more relevant ideas, based on smarter uses of athlete data.

Nike On Demand proved that effective use of data is integral to the success of a company in the business of human potential, and it highlighted that the human touch is crucial, even as bots become more sophisticated.

Nike On Demand put the data from 50+ Millions of Nike+ users to work.

Real time qualitative and quantitative data analysis enabled us to motivate consumers personally, on their channels, on their terms.

Nike On Demand used data to bring personalised hyper-relevant motivation to individual athletes via 1:1 messaging.

And it used rich data-driven user profiles to create deep personal engagement and close human relationships between users and a brand.

As soon as a user began a conversation, we began developing their unique profile with a tagging system built into our bespoke profiling interface: everything from their sport and level to their tone and sense of humour. This way, different experts could seamlessly pick up a conversation where another had left off and deliver genuinely personalized messages, not the stale messages of an automated chat bot.

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

Those insights then formed the basis of bespoke motivation and training plans, with the experts in the command center tapping into the entire Nike ecosystem to serve up the relevant Nike services (e.g. a Nike Training Club classes), experiences (e.g. a private training session with a professional athlete) and products (e.g. the right apparel or footwear) for each individual user.

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.