Tag Archives: sport

Studio – Have fun running on a treadmill

February 18, 2018 jessicatang405149 Leave a comment

Running on a treadmill in your living room or at the gym can be rather boring. Also, there is no one there to motivates and monitors you. Many people, therefore, hire a professional coach to help them go through some training sessions. However, not everyone can afford a 40 euro/hour sessions guided by professional coaches. Another option would be attending group classes, which is much cheaper than having a personal coach; however, the timing of these group classes don’t always fit your schedule. These will eventually become excuses for us to skip a fitness session. Is there a solution?

CEO and founder Jason Baptiste had a goal to lose 50 extra pounds after he finished school and decided to run 5km every day on the treadmill. However, after hundred days of running on a treadmill, he found it extremely boring and discouraging. This gives him the idea to develop a platform which will improve the whole treadmill experience. Meet Studio, a treadmill app on your smartphones or smartwatches that will bring motivation convenience and excitement to each of your training session. After subscribing to their services, users gained access to classes coached by professional coaches that motivate and guides users through their training session. Every class is accompanied by playlists that users can choose from. In addition, classes are offered in different difficulties and in different lengths; users can choose the corresponding classes according to their own needs. The classes can be taken anytime and anywhere.

Engaging the users

It is not only about running on the treadmill, Studio collects distance, speed and biometric data from every user that took the classes and these will be imported into the Real-time Leaderboard. Every user is rewarded with the in-app virtual currency Fitcoin after each session depending on how long and how far he/she has run. Fitcoin will defined users position on the leaderboard. Furthermore, Studio elevates its gamification experience to another level by making all users start with the basic level – Basic bear. Earning more Fitcoin, by running more, will allow users to rank up. To further motivates users during their training session, the real-time heartbeat of the users will be shown on the leaderboard and so as their real-time Fitcoin balance. In addition, users can choose to click on the cheer button during the session to motivates other users that are also doing the same exercise at the same time. In the future, Studio is planning to enable users to redeem Fitcoin for real-world prizes. Even though Studio targets users that would prefer flexible classes as opposed to physical group classes, the app still managed to provide users the same motivation they would get in a group-based training session with the help of its real-time leaderboard.

The business

Studio currently operates under a subscription-based model, which requires users to either pay $15 per month or a $100 upfront payment a year for unlimited access. The success of such Netflix and Spotify alike subscription model is dependent on the number of subscribers. To ensure that there is a sufficient and increasing amount of subscribers, Studio has to make sure that it keeps satisfying its existing users and at the same time keeps attracting new users. Like many other subscription-based business models, Studio offers new users with the opportunity to try out the services for free for a period of two weeks. Also, users can cancel their subscription at any time (for monthly subscribers). Every day, new trainings will be available for users to choose from. Besides, Studio has purchased full music licenses and therefore is able to offer a wide range of music for users to choose from. Studio is targeting both busy working professional and parents who often do not have time to visit the gym and own a treadmill at home. As for the professional coaches, Studio incentivized them to work for the platform by paying a commission of every listed class depending on the popularity of the class. Coaches are not limited to the number of participants in such platform compared to a physical classroom, there can be up to 20000 people taking their classes which is nearly impossible in a normal group training session.

Furthermore, it has been announced that Studio will partner up with treadmill maker Life Fitness to incorporate the Studio’s classes on Life Fitness treadmills in gyms. This will enable Studio to connect to an even larger audience as Life fitness is one of the largest and top manufacturers of fitness equipment. At the same time, having Studio integrated into the Life fitness treadmill will help Life fitness step into the digital fitness business.

References:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/health-fitness/studio-running-fitness-class/

https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/07/studio-life-fitness-partnership/

http://studio.live/#instructors

https://www.forbes.com/sites/darrenheitner/2017/10/19/this-app-is-the-peloton-for-running-removing-boredom-from-treadmills/#592e3bc2c9d3

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Personalized Online Adverstising Effectiveness: The Interplay of What, When, and Wher

February 16, 2017 382963aj Leave a comment

If you go to any website, or online store specifically, your behaviour is tracked. Landing page, time spent, clicks, exit page: you name it, it is tracked. But even when you leave a page, a company does not really leave you: they saw what you clicked on, and based on your browsing behaviour, they retarget you: they show you a (sometimes personalized) advertisement on another channel, hoping you will come back and purchase the product you viewed.

Retargeting can either be done during or after a website visit, and is done based on a customer’s visit. When showing personalized recommendations, for example, it is important to take into account the quality of the recommendation, the level of personalization and the timing. This is what Bleier & Eisenbeiss (2015) looked at: what should they show, when should they show it, and where should they show it.

As with any academic article, past literature is analysed and hypothesis are developed. In order to test the what, when and where of personalized online advertising effectiveness, Bleier & Eisenbeiss conduct two large-scale field experiments and two lab-experiments. The first field experiment looked at the interplay of degree of content personalization(DCP), state, and the time that has passed since the last online store visit, at a large fashion and sports goods retailer, who carries over 30000 products. The second field experiment, conducted at the same retailer, looked at the interplay of placement and personalization. Based on the results from these two field experiments, two lab experiments were designed: one focussing on web browsing in an experiential model, the other focussing on goal-direct web browsing.
Within this paper, thus, many things are studied and confirmed. The papers shows the importance of how to determine the effectiveness of online personalization’s, and which one works best when. When a customer sees a personalized ad right after his/her website visit, the ad becomes more effective. This is mainly because preferences are not constant: they can over time. Thus if you liked a shirt 5 minutes ago, you will mostly still like it now. Thus if a company is able to directly respond to a consumer’s behaviour, the CTR is expected to be higher.

While the effectiveness of recommendations decreases over time, the level of personalization plays a moderating role. This means that high-level personalization in later stages of the decision making process have lower effectiveness, because of changes in customers tastes’ and preferences. The personalized ad is therefore not applicable anymore. Thus, the more personalized an ad, the sooner after a website visit it should be sent. Moderate personalized ads are thus more effective over time, as they take into account these changes in preferences. As visual recommendations are often highly personalized, these type of recommendations are more relevant shortly after a visit. Cross-sell recommendation, which is a more moderate recommendation type, performs better later in time

So what does this all mean? When retargeting customers and showing them personalized ads, it is important to keep in mind how long ago they visited a website. Given that this research was performed at a large fashion/sports retailer, it would be interesting to see whether the same conclusions hold for other settings. What do you think? And when do you consider (personalized) ads target to you most effective?

Bleier, A., & Eisenbeiss, M. (2015). Personalized Online Adverstising Effectiveness: The Interplay of What, When, and Where. Marketing Science, 669-688.

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Athletes crowdfunding their way to the Olympics

May 12, 2014 ylannr Leave a comment

Making your way to the Olympic Games as an amateur athlete requires talent, hard work, dedication and discipline. But not only! Training sessions, coach, equipment, flight tickets, hotel rooms… the life of an athlete comes with a considerable cost. While professional athletes are sponsored by various brands and potentially collect money by winning competitions, amateur athletes must rely on alternative sources of revenue to fund their sporting career.

Having faced the dilemma of choosing between an athlete career and a more conventional path, two Canadian former amateur athletes founded the website Pursu.it. This non-profit crowdfunding platform is run by volunteers and designed to help amateur athletes of any country to gather funding in order to reach one specific goal in their athletic careers such as making the podium, getting to the next competitive event, or making the national team.

Pursuit uses reward-based crowdfunding, meaning that contributors are promised varying levels of rewards depending on the amounts pledged. The usual rewards include signed equipment, lessons and personal phone calls. As described by co-founder Leah Skerry, the givebacks are personal items and real “bragging-right pieces”. The main incentives for contributors are thus clearly the access to exclusive products, the belonging to a community of close fans and philanthropy. (Agrawal et al., 2010)

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