Adidas uses MicroStrategy analytic insights 'to get closer to consumers'

Michael Voegele, vice president of global IT and head of enterprise architecture for Adidas Group, explains how the sportswear firm uses MicroStrategy to bring consumers a better experience

Adidas, one of the biggest sportswear companies in the world and kit provider to many top sports teams, has deployed a MicroStrategy business intelligence solution in an effort to "get closer to the consumer" and provide a better "brand experience".

That's what Michael Voegele, vice president of global IT and head of enterprise architecture for Adidas Group told the audience at MicroStrategy World Forum 2014 in Barcelona, Spain.

He used his keynote to describe how the rise of smartphones and tablets is providing retailers with more information about consumers than ever before and how Adidas is doing all it can to exploit the fact that the mobile has become "the remote control for life" for the benefit of both the business and the customer. Adidas has more than 150,000 "touchpoints" with customers through retail, e-commerce and wholesale.

The sportswear firm sees an increasingly connected world as a source rich with huge amounts of data, which Voegele said can be used to provide customers with a better "brand experience".

"Mobile devices and mobile applications are taking over traditional software, but also the Internet of Things is used to gather strategic big data and actionable insights," he explained.

"That's where we also target and we see that as part of the solution to getting closer to our consumers," Voegele continued, adding that big data and analytics is the way Adidas believes it can get back to "the roots of the company" in providing "what's best for the athlete and what's best for the consumer."

Voegele described how in order to take on this challenge, the Adidas IT department decided to consolidate its four data warehouses into one and apply analytics software to more efficiently find the answers it was seeking.

"We decided to consolidate four separate data warehouses into one single platform which we run today on an SAP HANA environment.

"We connected traditional databases to the platform, but we're also connecting Hadoop information and consumer information which we gain from the platform," he said, before going on to describe how Adidas also applied a MicroStrategy solution to gain proper business insight from its data.

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Adidas uses MicroStrategy analytic insights 'to get closer to consumers'

Michael Voegele, vice president of global IT and head of enterprise architecture for Adidas Group, explains how the sportswear firm uses MicroStrategy to bring consumers a better experience

"But what do you want to do with all this data? You want to create business value, you want to have a means of using the data and turning it into something meaningful for our Adidas partners in the business group," Voegele told the audience.

"So on top of the HANA platform we have decided to use MicroStrategy to farm data, which we deployed across the group worldwide."

The reason for the move is that the firm wants to be able to quickly analyse and internally distribute data about consumers at any time, he explained, with data created by mobile forming a major source of information.

"Mobile is where we want to go; we want to be anywhere, anytime and we want to provide information about what our consumers do and think out there in the world. But we also want to create a faster approach in actually delivering those insights to our business partners, which is why we want to use more and more BI self-services and be capable of reacting to changes we see out there in the world," he said.

Voegele added that the combination of MicroStrategy and SAP HANA allows Adidas to be far more agile in its decision-making process, suggesting that analytics could even be used to predict which products or services a consumer might want next.

"The most important thing is how to convert from the old financial reporting to something that helps you predict what is going to happen in the marketplace, predict what the consumers will like, or influence consumers in regard to their purchase decisions."

Voegele also made it clear that Adidas does not see compiling a general overview of its customers as a good reason for using analytical tools; instead, the company wants to be able to draw upon data about individuals.

"Clearly we do see the BI platform – where we have MicroStrategy as the front end – as the foundation to understand each single one of our consumers. We don't want to look at aggregates, we want to look at a single consumer and make sure he gets a great brand experience with the Adidas Group," he said.

"And at the end of the day, that hopefully helps bring us closer to our consumers," Voegele concluded.