Irrelevant measures? Nope. Goals? Yes! #makeitcount

BIG RELEASE TODAY

Today sees the release of Nike's NIKE+ FUELBAND.

For anybody who followed and used the first generations of NIKE+ this is a clear and radical transition. 

In the words of Nike,

'Nike+ FuelBand tracks your activity through a sport-tested accelerometer into NikeFuel. Nike+ FuelBand tracks running, walking, dancing, basketball, - and dozens of everyday activities. So put it on and get moving.'

Aside from the absolutely insane amounts of fantastic data that will be available inside Nike, what interests us from a #measure perspective is two things:

1. The translation of many different types of activity into one single common measure, and,
2. The use of Goals in FuelBand lexicon.

1. COMMON MEASURES

We've described at length our strong belief that pretty much any marketing measure (Visits, Likes, Impressions, Shares, Mobile time on site, Purchases) can be translated into a single, common, normalized measure. We call the measure Digital Brand Minutes to describe the impact of any given interaction with your brand. But maybe BrandFuel would be a better description.

The way that FuelBand translates any physical activity into a common measure called NikeFuel, and even brands it Nike for good measure, is proof that there's a movement to simplify, not over-complicate, life. It would have been so easy to build some kind of involved dashboard showing tracking or little dials to show how much 'dancing', 'tae kwondo', or 'football' I had done today. But then how to I compare my activity levels between Saturday and Wednesday or between 3 years ago when I ran a lot and now when I, um, conduct orchestras? Much less compete against friends doing completely different activities. 

The same applies in marketing. How else do you compare the impact of one campaign against another or optimize within campaign channels if you don't have a common measure? Well done Nike for showing that ballet can be compared with horse-riding and, by proxy, confirming that Likes should be compared with App downloads.

2. GOALS

'So how does this campaign compare with others?' is not the only key question here. 

What's almost more important is 'How did this campaign perform against the goals we set for it?'

Nike+ FuelBand is all about goals. Check out the screenshot below. (You may need to expand the image to get the detail).

With this iteration of Nike+, Nike is leading with Goals, at least from a messaging perspective. It's all about setting a goal for yourself and then working towards that goal. Only you know how much investment you're willing to make and while running a marathon a week may be no big deal for you, just getting out and taking a dance class is a huge achievement for me.

You see where we're going here.

We have always strongly advocated setting campaign goals for our clients. It's a bit of a cliche but you really can't say that you've done well or failed unless you have defined up-front what you're hoping to achieve! And it's hard to set coherent campaign- or brand-level goals if you don't have a normalized measure to apply.

It looks like Nike are taking the same approach with FuelBand - a normalized measurement approach alongside a focus on leading with goals.

Sign us up!