Athleisure, big data & humanity
The way we dress has always evolved, with a wealth of fashion alternatives among different segment of our societies. In any given situation, among any group of people and in any country, there might be differences when it comes to what is ‘acceptable’ and what is ‘not acceptable’ as to what we wear. Usually both take its own evolving forms within fashion adoption throughout time. In the last decade or so hipsters, hippies, sports fanatics and the ‘mainstream’ (respectively) can unite in adopting the rise of athleisure and activewear as these are becoming ever more ubiquitous in the gigantic world of fashion.
Yoga and lattes
Take a pastime activity such as yoga for which you will need some yoga leggings. A company like lululemon athletica (est. 1998) and their success, growing revenue by 24% in 2018 to €2.96bn*, played a large role in raising the yoga pants as both a fashion and fitness statement. Where yoga itself, an ancient form of spiritual exercise, had been popular among niche groups of society it is now far more mainstream. Which brings us to leggings, having its rise and rise again since 2008, blowing both the athleisure and activewear trends out the park.
The increasing ubiquity of these terms does mean that target audience and market segment lines in fashion/apparel are becoming ever more blurred. Price-wise a keen fashionista might have to decide between saving up a few years (?) to buy some collector’s Adidas at €4.5k or just a few months for a pair of Amina Muaddi‘s. Ever since the rise of athletes in terms of popularity, in itself due to the rise of television, Sports Apparel has evolved into a mass-market on its own. However, with these trends in the latest decade, the true capturing of sales in this market has been and will likely increase in complexity.
From blurred lines…
These lines have blurred for a multitude of reasons. Beside numerous direct examples, such as Armani sweatpants competing with Nike sweatpants, there is the added fact that sales are increasingly scattered with hoodies, sweatpants and sneaker startups popping up across the globe. With the rise of more dominant companies like UK based Gymshark, competing for people that are quite loyal brand followers has become an increasingly complex task. Adding rising consumer demand for personalised experiences to this equation has led to a sports apparel behemoth like Nike to hire an army of data scientists. Besides this, it has acquired several data science companies including recently Celect, which performs predictive analysis of demand on big data using machine learning algorithms. After all this, it announced in an e-commerce pivot to stop selling on Amazon to wholly focus in its own direct-to-consumer channels.
A company like Nike with €30.5bn in annual revenue, nearly double that of what their earnings were in 2008 and of which 30% comes from direct-to-consumer channels, has the ability to use a lot of its own massive data set. Even so a large piece of the potential market segments that can be carved out and reached might go unnoticed. The rise in revenue has also coincided with the rise of the smartphone, Instagram influencers and the overall digital revolution that has added a whole new social layer to our lives. As such a ‘human’ approach to analysing potential markets and target audiences is crucial, as addressed in this TED talk by Global Tech Ethnographer Tricia Wang.
To emotions
Beyond big data and revenue, the way we dress as well as accept how others dress doesn’t change overnight nor does it remain the same throughout our lives. While big data is useful it will not fully capture the human side of such decisions, of the purpose, the associations and perceived longer-term value of buying any given brand over another. Using internal data will tell you how much your brand sold, your market share, where demand has increased and a wealth of other things. Yet if bench-marked against what potentially could be referred to as ‘emotional data’, such as the instant mental connections made in our brains when considering a brand, developing rather than past trends, the true underlying nature of purchase decisions and the forged future emotional connections and purchase decisions will be uncovered.
Executives across the board have come to agree that it is the emotional triggers for setting out to buy any given brand that will lead to discovering the swathes of white space that would normally go unnoticed. As Tricia Wang highlights in her talk ‘The human insights missing from big data’, if you would have been an executive at Nokia in 2008 you would have taken a different approach to the developing trends at that time. Having taken into account the human aspect of data might have prevented going from €72bn annual revenue to €5.4bn (!) in just 6 years (2008–2014).
Garments and footwear are close to us, well, literally on our skin, this means the emotional connection to apparel brands is even more intense than when it comes to any other product or service. Gymshark might well be the very brand that eats large chunks of the Nike and Adidas sales in the next 6 years, having grown from zero to one using no marketing budget. It leveraged the power of social media, which as a trend in itself swiftly accelerated after the launch of the smartphone, and the increasing influence it has on our emotional connections with others and brands.
What is now vs what comes next
We all ask ourselves what will come next as well as review as to what has happened, think of the end of year reviews and next year predictions so widespread during the end of any year (while you are at it check out this review for 2019 by Ipsos ‘A world of Research’, to get some context and actual ‘humanity’ driven data). Being sure when making decisions in a business and marketing context is crucial, this needs to be fueled by both quantitative and qualitative data, both ‘big’ and emotional data. The big data debate has increased the value of data driven decisions (positive), yet could become more and more distorted from our actual emotional connections to brands and the overlooking of a developing trend crucial to the survival of your business (negative).
Purpose driven and sustainable business growth will definitely be a major business trend for 2020, yet for purpose a degree of focus is required and with focus comes the occasional loss of the bigger picture.
- Nike might want to focus itself increasingly on the emotional triggers for buying their sneakers over that of a local competitor in any given cultural/country context.
- While Under Armour might already be asking itself where to carve out white space to counter its declining revenue growth rate, launching recovery sleepwear.
- Asics will likely be keen on replicating the setting of the trend of wearing sneakers under suits;
- As ‘younger’ companies such as Gymshark will continue to eat away at the sales that could have been captured as the competitive landscape scatters away.
You could always try to get emotional data from a YouTube video like this:
However, it is probably better to obtain it from the results that a wealth of research tools could provide you with. Preventing the AI, big data and quantification biases to take over from the human context, the emotional triggers of the actual people out there that are driving the trends to evolve and develop. Your whole team, our whole team and the programmers at Hadoop are all intelligent human beings, yet we all have our own focus areas and biases. Although important, our own views could get in the way of truly impactful decisions based on the actual broader human context. To grow your brands in a truly sustainable way let your decisions be fueled by both factual and emotional numbers.
