Digital Transformation Project – Anytime data and fitness

12

October

2016

5/5 (2)

There are many different types of athletes. Some like to go to gym early in the morning, others prefer to sweat late at night. Either way, Anytime fitness is the perfect solution. As the name states, this gym is open at any time! This is an option that not every gym has, so you can say Any time Fitness is a trend setter. However, even trend setters face some challenges. Let’s take a look at their IT challenge.

IT challenge

In times where data is omnipresent, companies do their best effort to capture this data for their own use. With this data it’s possible to give customers a personalized experience or to understand their needs. The problem is however that some companies do not know how to unlock the data or how to use it to gain a competitive advantage.

Nowadays, more and more data is collected through applications on smartphones and smartwatches such as the iOS Health app, the Runkeeper app or other applications. Anytime Fitness has a hard time making use of their data since they do not have a centralized point of data gathering. The challenge is: how can Anytime Fitness gather data and use it to segment their customers and give their customers a more personalized experience when working out?

Solution

The very core of this challenge is data gathering. How can Anytime Fitness gather data that customers generate during their workout? The solution for this IT challenge lies in the relatively new techniques revolving around wearables. Nowadays health wearables such as bracelets or smartwatches are disrupting the health industry.

The problem with these wearables however, is the wear-willingness of customers. They must be willing to wear the device, otherwise it will not gather data. The solution to this problem is simple. The fitness clubs will be designed in such a way they will need their wearable to access the fitness club or to use the machines.

Having tackled the problem of wear-willingness, it’s now important to discuss how the data is gathered and through which activities. From now on, every time a customer needs to scan their wearable, it will be called a POC or Point of contact. There are three important POCs: On the entrance, on the machines and on the lockers.

Personalized experience

As stated earlier, every POC generates data which can be used to create a personalized experience. This personalized experience consists out of two parts.

  1. Personalized training schedules. At this moment, Anytime Fitness uses schedules that are manually created by personal trainers. This takes a lot of time and effort, which they could be spending helping customers with their workout.
  2. The data that Anytime Fitness will gather will allow them to create more segmentation. This way they can target specific customer groups for certain  activities such as  women’s CrossFit.

Taking everything into account, we think that the introduction of wearables has a lot of potential for Anytime Fitness. Both the company and the customer will embrace and enjoy the new technology.

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Technology of the Week – [A clash of e-Market Titans: Bol.com vs. Coolblue]

4

October

2016

5/5 (2)

Over the past decades, innovations in information technologies, such as the Internet, have radically reduced the time and cost of processing and communicating information. In this blog we will discuss how these advances are affecting electronic market structures and firms and discuss the business models of Bol.com and Coolblue and the predictions for the market.

The electronic market industry is very competitive, as it involves a large number of firms. The threat of new entrants used to be moderate because of the high cost of capital required to acquire the needed platforms/products. However, nowadays firms tend to reach a lot of their customers through Social Media, which sets the entry barrier extremely low. Also, creating a webshop requires less effort, coordination and money than it just to. All of this intensifies the competition, making the switching costs for customers low.

porter

 

BOL.COM

Bol.com was founded in 1999 and is the biggest web shop of the Benelux Union. Initially Bol.com started as an online bookstore.

bol

The business model of Bol.com is growing through market penetration, this by making the site a platform where the consumer is able to find everything they want. Over the last couple of years Bol.com opened a marketplace and expanded to Belgium.

COOLBLUE

Coolblue was founded in 1999 in The Netherlands. In 2000 they launched their first webshop, selling MP3 players. In 2001 they expanded to Belgium. Coolblue is known for being one of the best employers on the market and they are well on their way to becoming the biggest (online) retail company of the Netherlands. The business model Coolblue uses is differentiating through different niche markets, offering excellent service.
By offering a good service, they innovated by:

  • Being the first large webshop to adopt iDeal
  • Introduced a next day delivery service ‘if ordered before 23.59’ and same day delivery service if ordered before 15.00

Now that we have analyzed the business models, we were able to make the following SWOT analysis for both companies.

 

swot
Predictions for the market

Looking at current developments in information technology, the spread of some popular developments could affect electronic markets:

First of all, the delivery of sold items. The trend nowadays is that of the sharing economy where people share all sorts of items. Extending this trend could lead to people sharing their trunk to deliver packages people buy at webshops.

Second, when all companies are aligning prices, differentiating on the market will be done through value added services such as computer installation or personalized workshops for free.

Third, when looking at the trend of big data analytics, it is only a matter of time before electronic markets and webshops can offer a customer a personalized shopping experience, by predicting the items a customer will buy.

And last, with the trend of webshops increasing their product categories and assortments, webshop specialization will be a thing of the future. Customers with specific requests will go to specific webshops instead of the big players.

 

 

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What about Big Data?

22

September

2016

5/5 (2)

For those who are attached to privacy, they are particularly threatening. But big data can predict trends in society and thereby make it a bit safer. However, the question is: should everything that can also be? Do we have to socially accept everything? Privacy and (social) acceptance are two important elements we have to take into consideration when we talk about big data.

We can all agree that there is a lot to win with the use of big data and big data analytics. There have been many cases in different settings where the use of Big Data has paid off. But at the same time, so much about the impact of big data remains unclear. What role do consumers or businesses take? How do different countries think about big data and privacy, and which models work and do not? What are the principles? But above all, how do you ensure that user privacy remains safeguarded while at the same time raises no unnecessary thresholds to the opportunities of big data for both society and the economy?

Take the following example for instance; when you see someone walking down the street with a crowbar, you won’t find it strange if a policeman would ask that man or woman what he or she is planning to do with that crowbar. Does the same apply if, according to data from stores or banks, someone has bought an alarm clock at Hema and fertilizer at the garden center? The police may conclude that that person is planning to make a bomb. However, are those facts sufficient to conduct a research? Another question is whether everything that is technically possible, may also socially acceptable?

Regardless of different views people take on this subject, it is of great importance to outline the scenarios for the near future in the political and social debate to keep continuing to exploit the full potential of big data.

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The future of crowdsourcing

21

September

2016

4.67/5 (3)

”The times they are a changing”. Bob Dylan put this line in of one of his songs. It definitely brings a certain sentiment along with it. In the sixties he sang about change in that time. As the time indeed changed; Information was spread much faster. Nowadays, we live in a world where information is being created, exchanged and shared at the speed of light.

When we look at these changes through a managerial glass, we can say that change entails a high degree of flexibility. The times they are a changing and the pace of change is picking up. In order to respond to this, businesses nowadays need to go along with these changes, innovate or invent new solutions. Time, companies and consumers change. The product itself is simply not enough to satisfy the customers anymore. The mass is becoming increasingly important, especially when it comes to innovation. Innovation creates room for ‘knowledge sharing’ and ‘co-creation’. Many students are familiar with the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is an excellent example of ‘knowledge sharing’ and ‘co-creation’; available for the mass, created by the mass. But what about using the crowd and develop your business model around it?

Nowadays, almost everyone knows about crowdsourcing and this is becoming more and more popular. On the net we often find successful stories of remarkable crowdfunding projects. Those projects get a lot of attention and raise more of the expected or required budget. It is interesting to know which route crowdsourcing will take in the future. In Gartner’s Hype Cycle crowdsourcing is currently on the peak (Peak of inflated expectation). But how soon will crowdsourcing follow this cycle? The increasing success stories of these crowdfunding projects lead to great expectations,which in turn creates a hype about this subject. When one realizes that these expectations are unrealistic and exaggerated the hype turns into a disillusion. Nevertheless, crowdsourcing will continue to exist and will, over time, reach a more stable phase (plateau or productivity). According to Gartner, it would be 5 to 10 years before crowdsourcing will be embraced as a method to do to business.

Although this phenomenon is well known, I am still optimistic about the future of crowdsourcing. In fact, I believe that crowdsourcing can quickly get into a more stable phase and eventually receive a fixed place within the business where it will become a habit. Given the emerging technological developments, we are moving one step closer to the online environment every day. The Internet is indispensable and more and more of our daily activities include the use of Internet. In addition, social relationships, locating and approaching people all around the world gets more accessible, allowing crowdsourcing to benefit from this. I expect that companies will use crowd sourcing for different purposes. For example, if we shift the innovation task from one innovation manager to the crowd, we’ll have substantially better initiatives. Also, the use of crowd creation brings many advantages. These are not all benefits in financial or technological field but also in the social field. Customers will feel more connected to the company, as they can make a contribution.

All things considered, the emerging technological developments will greatly play a role and customer needs will ultimately determine the future. Therefore, gradually more and more companies will involve their customers with the services / products they provide. I therefore predict a good future for crowdsourcing and expect that crowd creation will grow faster and its popularity will increase.

 

References:

Brussee, R., Hekman, E., Rovers, M., Swart, D., Vliet, H. van (2013), Crowdsourcing, Utrecht: Creatieve Industrie Utrecht, http://www.crossmedialab.nl/files/crowdsourcing.pdf

Gartner (2014), Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Maps the Journey to Digital Business, http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2819918

Meuleman, T. (2012), Crowdsourcing – de stand van zaken,  http://www.marketingfacts.nl/berichten/crowdsourcing-de-stand-van-zaken, 25 februari 2015

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