Nike CEO Mark Parker
On His Company's Digital Future: Body-Controlled Music, Color-Coded Heart Rates
When
Nike CEO Mark Parker is about to reveal
something ahead of the company's plan, his PR teams will try to stop him.
Parker is sitting in his office on Nike's Beaverton, Oregon, campus--a room
filled with endless oddities and knick-knacks--discussing Nike's digital
future. "The digital and physical worlds are starting to come together more
seamlessly--it's only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's coming. I can't
get into all the details here, but just imagine..." He stops abruptly when
someone on his PR team shoots him a look. "Oh, see this is where [my
handlers] give me the stink-eye," Parker says, smiling.
If
Parker is tiptoeing through this chat, it's in part because Nike is undergoing
a digital revolution, having launched its innovative Nike+ platform, the
technology giving the company life on iPhones and Xboxes, as well as hardware
products such as FuelBand, the slick electronic wristband that
tracks your activity.
As Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps puts it, "Nike has broken
out of apparel and into tech, data, and services, which is so hard for any
company to do." In the coming years, Nike will expand its footprint in the
digital space, especially through partnerships like the one it struck with
TechStars, to attract startups to build on the Nike+ platform. So Parker is
hesitant--he doesn't want to spoil any surprises. But in the course of talking
with Fast Company about how Nike ranks among the world's Most Innovative Companies, Parker offered
fascinating clues into what's next in Nike's digital transformation.
Leaning back in his chair, Parker
says he's especially excited about the potential for delivering new kinds of
feedback to customers. Products like FuelBand, which gives users real-time
updates on how many calories they've burned or steps they've taken throughout
the day, often serve as a motivating force to elicit more energy output. The
wristband offers simple color cues to encourage more activity from users--red
for less active, and green for more active. Nike is now looking for novel ways
to create more motivational tools in its digital arsenal.
"Just imagine if your body
could control or change the music that you're listening to--if your movement
could actually change the cadence of the music, the tempo, or the beat.
Sound--there's a lot of things going on in that area that are very exciting,"
Parker says. "So there could be new ways to get feedback--through audio
feedback--for how your body is performing. The same could happen with heart
rate."
It's a novel idea, and one that
takes advantages of the things people are already using when exercising--that
is, listening to music while running.
Parker also says "visual
feedback" is another area of interest. Rather than use one universal color
code for activity, he imagines there could be more specific uses of visual
feedback. "These are examples of ways that you can bring the performance
of your body alive through different sensory inputs. Color is one: if your
heart rate was converted into color, or your movement was converted into color.
But it's all about giving the athlete more feedback and helping use that
feedback or interpret that feedback in a way that's going to improve their
performance or their level of fitness or just make the experience a lot more
interesting."
Of course, such pie-in-the-sky ideas
are more likely closer to vaporware--concepts that may or may not make their
way into final products. On a more practical level, Nike Digital Sport division
VP Stefan Olander told me Nike's digital future is likely to involve more
personalization. "How can we understand more about you, learn more about
your motivation, so we have our whole exploration around making this better for
you by knowing more about what you need?" he says. That's in addition to
what he calls "new, smarter hardware."
And don't think such devices will be
limited to the wrist, like FuelBand.
"You know, wherever there is a
good place to learn about the body, we're looking at it," Olander hints.
By
Austin Carr http://www.fastcompany.com/3005528/most-innovative-companies-mark-parker-nikes-digital-future?partner=newsletter
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