The company's goal for the thesis was to find functional answers to better manage the changes in the rapidly changing world of sports retail. From early on, the focus was on the consumer side and the study formed around that angle.
Case: Amer Sports OY
About the company
Amer Sports owns international brands such as Salomon, Atomic, Arc'teryx, Wilson, Mavic, ENVE Composites, Precor, DeMarini and Louisville Slugger. Amer Sports aims to be truly customer-centric in all its functions: services and products alike.
Research Question & Thesis Statement
How Amer Sports brands can seamlessly engage with modern consumers at all critical touchpoints to deliver amazing omnichannel experiences. How can Amer Sports better empower and engage with female sports consumers in multi-channel environments to help them become brand advocates.
Conceptual framework and chosen method
In what ways can digital marketing innovations help connect with Gen Z customers to ensure profitable growth for brands. They should try to find a way that reflects real situations that consumers face every day while interacting with the brand.
Literature review and term definition
Consumers' multi-device lifestyles make the consumer shopping model quite continuous with multiple touch points. In the future, the importance of the telephone will decrease and the top three ways to interact with consumers are expected to be through online communities, social media channels and company websites.
The changes of retail centers in a nutshell
- The next generation of shoppers
- Experiential purchases
- Omni-channel
- Seamless solutions across all channels
- Differences between touchpoints and channels
The days of "The Breakfast Club," with easily recognizable, stereotypical characters or certain exclusivities like the "You Can't Sit With Us" ideals that were popular in early 2000s teen culture, won't translate well. today's younger consumers. Even considering the basic psychology of supply and demand, companies should actively create experiences for consumers to live their best lives possible.
Brand interaction
Connecting with storytelling
It is important to understand that the term touchpoint is not the same as a channel. The channel context should be understood in such a way that the same consumer need or want is seamlessly met by different channels.
Community thinking
Potential brand storytelling often comes from an outside marketing consulting firm, not the brand itself. It is important for the brand to nurture relationships, organize events and meet these fans to interact with them.
Trending: Athleisure and the active lifestyle
And data from Euromonitor supports this mindset, as the global health and wellness sector is expected to grow by 17 percent over the next five years. Inauthentic, insincere messages don't get through to the new generations, and honesty has to be carried through even in the products, especially when it comes to traditional practices in the garment industry.
Consumer experience
CEM – how to manage the experience
Most of the time, these strategies are designed internally and do not communicate with the market or target consumers. They bring the desired experience to life with the help of marketers, who return from brand protectors to brand producers.
Educating the consumers for a lasting, active relationship
Start from the inside – organizational mindset
- Employee empowerment
- Team work across all organizational departments
- eNPS – how loyal are the employees?
- Benchmarking
Consumer should be at the center of everyone and in every project, while the organizational structure becomes more collaborative. Since each employee has unique skills and talents, these must be implemented in daily work to achieve the best possible results. In the fast phase industry, it is not possible to keep growing while standing still, and to reduce costs.
Psychology behind behavior and decision making
Needs and wants should not be mixed
It often happens that needs and wants are wrongly labeled in the same box, especially when we talk about consumers. When we understand these needs and where they come from, it becomes easier to create gratifying new actions. It is necessary to actively identify unexpressed needs and those needs that please the consumer, e.g.
Influences on purchase decisions
These are called utilitarian, which are experienced as normal or practical, hedonic, which bring pleasure, biogenic, which are physiological needs and finally, psychogenic needs, which are about acceptance and social dynamics. According to Philip and Kevin Kotler, the needs of which consumers are not fully aware should also be stated. For companies to differentiate, it is important to help consumers learn what they really desire, even at a hidden need level, such as how consumers want to appear in their social circles.
Gender and its relations to consumer behavior
Differences between female and male shoppers
They see meetings as an opportunity to get acquainted, and men go directly to the purpose of the task at hand. The importance of word of mouth is evident from the results, when 35% of the same women answered that they were influenced by consumer reviews on the company's website. Almost 800 products were surveyed and since the individual consumer cannot influence the price of marketed products, manufacturers and retail sectors are responsible.
Sporty female consumers
This study found that there are significant differences in pricing by gender, with women paying more 42% of the time, while men only pay more 18% of the time. Advertisements for sports clothing and equipment can be considered a very important way of approaching knowledge about athletes, which is done very well compared to male athletes, but women's sports do not have an audience. With properly focused and smartly targeted ads, there would be a huge opportunity to capitalize on the women's market in the strongest segment of the global apparel industry, sportswear.
Connecting with Gen Z
This shows that Gen Zers will not be an easy advertising target as they are adapted to quickly filter through information, actively research things and do not easily form loyalty with brands. Trust is built more by engaging Gen Zers in creating and empowering them to solve things on behalf of the brand. Realism and the need for authenticity are going to play a big role in how Gen Zers receive information.
Qualitative research
Observation
Usually, consumer reactions or buyer behavior are researched in specific face-to-face situations, but this research will apply the same methods in online environments. The online community observation was somewhat challenging as it never really closes and there is a lot of data observed. This is why observation in online community as a method can be appropriate and more ethical.
Netnography
Observing Social Media - Reddit
The need to get a wide variety of anonymous answers led me to choose between Instagram, the social media photo sharing app, and the largest global discussion forum Reddit.com. But since there is a need for general knowledge of consumer delight, it was believed that Reddit.com would provide more comprehensive data on both genders and all ages, from all over the world. Also bolstering the choice for observing interactions in Reddit.com was that analytics product site Alexa.com has listed Reddit as #8 on global website listings and it is listed as #5 in the United States only.
Ethics
Collecting data and analysis
Using Word Cloud to present qualitative data
With Word Cloud, word frequency can be easily detected and from there patterns can be revealed to help guide the analysis process. It is important to remember that Word Cloud does not do all the analysis and things need to be organized before you insert data into Word Cloud. Word Cloud should not be used with complex topics, such as budgets and crisis communications, as it is best in exploratory qualitative analysis.
Data analysis
Presenting pages of research data can be both overwhelming and challenging for readers, so it's good to think about ways to make it clear and easier to communicate to others. A word cloud is something that technological advancements have made possible to visually and effectively make the reader instantly accessible and able to make sense of otherwise ineffective textual data. In data analysis, the process is more continuous, circular, like the “Observe, Collect, and Reflect” model below, to allow potential new insights to be collected during the process.
Findings
- Insights of Athletic Wear Brands
- Best shopping experience
- Marketing to women
- Outdoors clothing
As there is an active discussion of female-dominated subreddits, it was clear that there needed to be a focused keyword search, not only because of the need to gain insight into the additional research question, but also because there was an obvious pool of strong needs and wants available. What would have brought more depth to the study would have been knowing the personas of Amer Sports and how this data matches them. Still, there is some knowledge of the target personas, and it is possible to go into the results in more depth with Amer Sports'.
Questions answered
As Amer Sports already has highly engaged and empowered employees, there is a great opportunity to further leverage these talents to be even more sincere brand ambassadors and use their individual talents for the benefit of all the company. This should be considered when building processes around seamless customer experience. Since these technologically fluent consumers will be online most of the time and their attention span is shorter for the same reasons, traditional marketing will not work with this target group.
Practical ideas for the brands
HCD - model
The task of the company or brand is to test so-called mini-pilots and evaluate the process by designing and implementing these solutions.
Design Thinking Process
Empathy mapping
This technique answers questions such as what the consumers see of the brand that offers them and how they act around the brand or how they communicate. By mapping in this way, it is possible to think about what kind of messages consumers receive from the brand and its competitors, and how it makes them feel and think. Similar to creating a buyer persona, coming up with their expectations and fears is effective because it helps create subjective value and personal meaning in the experience design.
Further study and research
Netnography: Gaining Social Media Insight, New York, NY, USA: The Balance.com. Educating Consumers to Increase Customer Share, San Francisco, CA, USA: Inc.com. Defining an Omnichannel Customer Experience, San Francisco, CA, USA: CMSwire.com.
5 Keys to Creating a Superior Customer Experience, New York, NY, USA: Linkdex.com. Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages, New York, NY, USA: Nielsen.com.
