Comparison Of Digital Activities: Nike And Puma Essay.

Does the brand facilitate their tribe and use them as a resource.
 

This report provides a detailed evaluation of the digital activities of two large clothing organizations namely Nike and Puma. Both the organizations have a stabilized position in the market and having a complete control on the operation in the global environment.  The digital activities of these two organizations are comparable because both the companies produce a similar types of products.  The sportswear giant Puma is planning to ramp up its customer based marketing campaign by integrating its offline and online channel via a new proposed platform. Similar, Nike is going to reinforce its digital media strategies introducing few more e-commerce sites for some particular nations Canada, Switzerland, Norway and widening its official site to coverage to engage sports-obsessive culture. Therefore, it can be mentioned that both the organizations are heading towards the goals with the similar digital activities approaches. The purpose of the report is to evaluate the digital initiatives taken by the organizations. The effectiveness of the strategies has been discussed with three particular criteria such as:

• The ability to enhance a desired level of customer service,
• The ability to use of social media channels effectively
• Create a similar integration both in offline and online marketing channels

Here, the secondary purpose is to gain a detailed insight about how Puma and Nike implement these activities as the part of their operation. Both the organizations provide similar products but these criteria determines how they differ in managing business operation. 

 Puma is one of the largest and leading apparel brands designing, developing, marketing and selling the footwear and apparel accessories. It is identified that for more than 65 years, the organization is delivering the most innovative products with its focus on offering performance as well as sports-inspired lifestyle products in several categories such as Football, Training, Golf and Motorsports. This sports and apparel brands offer products in more than 120 nations with the workforce strength of 13000 people worldwide (puma.com 2018).

On the other side, it is also identified that Nike broadly incorporate people’s culture in its operation. Nike was founded in 1954 and since then this American multinational apparel brand is engaged in the design, development and manufacturing with worldwide sales of footwear, apparel, accessories and other equipment’s (nike.com 2018). The organization has acquire many several apparel and footwear organizations over the course of its history and some of which since the inception been sold.

It indicates that Nike’s turnover with $8.7 billion is higher than Puma and in world ranking Nike has acquired the top position even though both the companies serve the similar products with the same segments. It is estimated that Nike has the highest response from its large market North America which is comparatively higher more active than the major markets of Puma.  In the mentioned segment, Nike reported 63% of their overall turnover.  

Analysis

In the following paragraph, the digital marketing activities of Nike and Puma have been compared with the help three different criteria which will include the scale 0 to 5 to broaden the comparison. The support the analysis, the data has been taken from the official website and other ecommerce sites of Nike and Puma.

The performance of score of Puma’s corporate site’s overall performance rate is 76, with the performance score hitting 21/30 but the SEO score of the site is 15 out of 30, which requires attention (Berman 2012). However, the site has highest traffic rate due to the recent initiative on the integration offline and online activities involving customer newsletter and enhancement of “automated customer communications” as well as broad data management and customer contracts through emailing and Facebook. On the other side, when it comes to customer service Nike uses a two way dialogue between the operation and the customers, Nike believes that to enhance service, it is highly to important to understand customer expectation; once the customer needs are identified, the “customers are yours” (Martin and Todorov 2010), To identify customer needs Nike uses the digital media, as the pathway.

 Nike’s ads do well because they include emption in the customer through emotional branding. As put forward by Kobayashi (2012), each add of Nike is crafted to instigate particular feeling and needs of the customer that can help to satisfy the needs of customers. On the other side, Puma pays attention to practical interaction with the customers. Before developing the digital advertising, Puma from its customer feedback portal collect feedbacks about the products and services and based on the identification of issues and queries in the form of feedback, the digital marketing approaches are developed. These different set of activities of two brands indicate that Puma is more responsive to customer because their customers come firs in customer services improve initiative through digital media. Conversely, Nike implements some effective but risky approaches, where customer’s feedback may come later.

Furthermore, the 10 C’s of marketing conducted in the previous assignment indicates that the organization Nike is worldly known for their consumer driven principles and innovative ideas related to marketing. With the long days of operation, Nike is able to portray a strong sense of bonding amongst the customers and the company itself. However, it has also been identified that Puma tends to apply more direct approach towards their customers, which remains as the crucial factor behind organization’s present current positioning in the market. When it comes to uniqueness in marketing approach, Kannan (2017) mentioned that Puma tends to pay attention to their retail partnership to maintain a desired level of interaction with the customers. 

 In order to enhance interaction with the customers, both the organizations takes advantage of the digital media channels. For example, Nike uses Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Linkedln, while Puma is active on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. According to nike.com. (2018),Nike currently has 381 social media profiles in which, 147 pages are created on Facebook, the number of twitter handles is around 105, Instagram accounts holds 23 profiles, 42 advertising subscription channels are created on YouTube and two other profile on Linkedln. The following figure provides the detailed digital media activities of Nike containing three channel Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

It indicates that compared to Puma, Nike has 14 different channels on YouTube but the total number of the updates is less while Puma’s updates is around 2945. On the other side, it has also observed that even though Nike’s updates in number are less, it has the highest subscribers while Puma is lagging behind in this context. Therefore, it can be mentioned that overall Nike is more responsive towards its audiences on social media channels compared to its competitor Puma.

On the other side, Puma has developed an effective social media strategy as the part of their customer interaction, in which the brand has incorporated several themes such as “Valentine Day Campaign”. However, this campaign went viral on 2010 World Cup due to misinterpretation (Westerman et al. 2012). Presently, Puma is active on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. At the initial stage of digital interaction, Puma took the decision to focus on their social media effort on enhancing customer engagement instead of creating a means to promote online sales.  Thus, to achieve this, the Puma restricted the number of posts that it sent globally referring to the target customers (Chi 2011). Presently, Puma’s strategy helps them to increase their social media profiles in the last three year to above 1.3 million twitter followers, over 15 million Facebook likes. However, they have 50 other social media profiles referring to the target audiences. 

	Puma	Nike
Is the firm able to provide desired level of customer service?

Table 1: Measuring the level of customer services provided by the brand

As put forward by Kim and Ko (2010), to compete in today’s dynamic and competitive market environment, the organisations should have an online presence. In this context, De Mooij, (2013) also commented that at the initial stage of interaction, maintaining a corporate website was adequate but now it has become so necessary for the organization to become active on the social media. Hence, it is particularly identified that both the organizations analyse their social media traffic as well as tracking advantage of insight which provides an optimal return on investment. When digging into Puma’s activity, it is identified that in spite of admittedly being somewhat of a late-comer in identifying the market potential of digital media, the organization Puma is now active on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram as well as several domain specie network falling under the global territories (puma.com 2018).

Conversely, Nike is one such brand which enjoys the greater levels of involvement on social media. Chu, Kamal and Kim (2013) argued that several social media campaigns have gone viral; for example, the case across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Linkedln. Nike tends to maintain a large range of page dedicated to its different products and different geographical; locations (Hadija, Barnes and Hair 2012). Hence, each of these profiles are managed with social media strategy and deep thought. The following figures describe the intensity of the activities of Nike on social media tools. According to the statistical figure given below Nike has 7 million Twitter user, in which the daily tweet is 1.5 on average but the 100% engagement is on weekdays (ETBrandEquity.com. 2018).

The statistical figures also indicates that almost 31% of Nike’s tweets were retweeted by its followers. Similarly, on Facebook, the total number of users on Facebook is around 31 million. This statistical data indicates that Nike effectively maintains the practice of interacting with the customers on a regular basis as the part of their overall customer service improvement and promotion. (Refer to appendix 1, for more detailed information given in the previous assignment). Nike created a rich digital media content for attracting the visitors (refer to appendix 2 for digital media content).

Conversely, it is also identified that the brand Puma is lagging behind with respect to effectiveness of social media. Almost 16000 users have regular response on Puma’s Facebook profile (Refer to appendix 1, for more detailed information given in the previous assignment). Likewise, on Twitter, the brand has almost 2 million regular followers and the average number of tweets made by the brand on Twitter is around 0.1.

The statistical figure also indicates that the percentage of retweet on twitter is 3% while 97% users did not retweet (ETBrandEquity.com 2018). Based on this statistics, it can be mentioned that with respect to effectiveness of engagement on social media, Puma lags behind, it needs to enhance its content to create a desired response in digital media channels.

Measuring the ability to use social media effectively

	Puma	Nike
Is the brand using social media effectively?

Table 2: Rating scale of social media activity of Puma and Nike

When it comes to offline and online integration, Puma is identified to be ramping up its customer-centric marketing campaigns by integrating both their offline and online channels via a new platforms. The brand is using “Teradata’s Digital Marketing Centre to back up its European newsletter, the enhancement of automated customer communication as well as the entire data management and customer contacts through emails and ads on social media channels (Jakobson, and  Zebedo 2014). On the other side, Nike collaborated with Spottify to integrate online and offline through music. Nike and Spotify teamed up for Nike’s female 10k running events in London with the objective of driving awareness of music’s positive effect on running performance as well as maximizing Spotify’s monthly usage among the users (Wirtz et al. 2013).

As a part of this integration initiative, Spotify positioned the installation on the ground floor of Nike’s Town in UK so that the customers can observe the feeling of their Tempo groups through vibrating podium and on screen animation. Hence, Nike is promoting its brand of products by enticing consumers into high quality music while running or taking part in fitness exercise events, where apparel and equipment will be provided by Nike. However, this initiative can only be treated as promotional initiative; thereby, Nike should pay attention to offline and online integration.

Conversely, as the purpose of offline and online integration initiative, Puma is using Mapp’s customer involvement platforms taking help from the integrated Data Management Platform to offer a personalize and targeted involvement with their users such as use of corporate website browsing data and behaviour  to personalize to show their ads (Tagashira and Minami 2016). As put forward by Hadija, Barnes and Hair (2012), Puma is using Wildfire’s Social Marketing Suit to deal with the workflows as well as category social page for multiple regional brands and sports. For example, during the Olympics in London, the organization had hosted an integrated offline and online special experience which was is known as “The yard”. The brand used streaming video, photography as well as blog content which was sourced from The Yard. Consequent, the organization gained the insight of diversifying its social content and omit the bottlenecks that damaged its social marketing execution earlier.

	Puma	Nike
Is the brand able to make a solid offline and online integration?

Table 3: Measuring the level of offline and online integration of the brands 

Conclusion 

In conclusion, it can be mentioned that as the use of technology is rapidly increasing, it is essential for the businesses or the marketers to adopt digital media strategies to operation. The discussion presented above clearly indicates that to reach the remote areas or to generate customer response in the remote areas, the digital media channels should be used as the pathway. From the comparison of digital media activities, it is gained that Puma is less active on social media channels compared to Nike while the field of offline and online integration, Puma is leading ahead with its extending initiatives.  The discussion also indicates that digital media channels are effective for promotion and advertising but acquiring a social media channel for promoting the products and services is not the only task that organization do. The organisations have to be customer-centric and must adopt the culture and trends when promoting the content in the social digital media channels. The brand Nike has once developed marketing strategy to persuade the customers but Puma’s marketing digital advertising strategies did not gain desired popularity. Therefore, Puma needs to pay attention to its digital media channels. 

References 

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