Case Study: Nike iD vs. Puma BBQ
Shoes have become very personal items. Very expensive, personal items. So it makes sense to see the footwear industry steer towards mass customization of its products in an attempt to keep and gain new customers. Everybody wears shoes right?
Nike iD
Nike has taken this approach with its Nike iD website, where customers can choose to customize sports shoes, or “every-day” shoes. You are allowed the option of starting from a pre-designed shoe, or designing from scratch. Starting from scratch gives you a plain white/gray sneaker, with ten components with which to mix and match a set of colors. Customizable sections of the shoe include the laces, tip and heel, base, Nike swoosh symbol, among others. There is also space at the back of the shoe for personal text, with a maximum of eight characters per shoe. The overall interface is sleek and simple, and gives the shoe center stage. I found the process to be easy to understand and navigate. Some pleasing features include the ability to zoom in on the shoe (to get an even closer look than an average person would get firsthand), and the opportunity to share the shoe with friends via Facebook and Myspace. While the average person may not care to showcase their latest custom shoes, this product isn’t for the average person. Consumers willing to pay $95.00 for customized “every-day” shoes want people to notice them. By allowing site visitors to show off their new creation on the personal profile pages, Nike receives free advertising.
Included with the shoe designs are supplementary materials at the bottom that explain the technology that went into the Nike Air Mogan iD Shoe. The video of the “Mogan in action” is a good idea in theory, but the fifteen-second clip doesn’t even show the shoe. While it doesn’t detract from the experience or the product, it’s a mis-executed good idea.
One snag in the process that did detract from the experience came at the last step, as I was trying to personalize the text at the back of the shoe. I had created powder blue and gold shoes to match the throwback jerseys for the San Diego Chargers. The text on the back would read “LT”. However, upon trying to apply this, I was denied. My personalized text did not fit Nike’s iD guidelines: “All iD choices need to follow our Personalization Policy.” Yet the Personalization Policy is nowhere to be found: no link in the notification window, or anywhere else on the page. The frustration of trying to understand why my innocent acronym was denied completely distracted me from my shoe purchase. Now while I admit, this is highly unlikely to be a “deal-breaker,” the fact that a simple piece of information is missing from the customization process is embarrassing.
I would also liked to have seen better execution of the sports shoes. The Nike iD homepage advertises the ability to “Customize your game. Take off in team colors.” However the only product available is the limited Kobe Bryant IV iD shoe, of which only 24 a day are sold worldwide. While it’s a great marketing ploy, it’s not what I was looking for. I expected shoes pre-designed for professional sports teams like baseball, football, and basketball. Nike already has the idea with its Team’s Collection (accessible via the “Collections” tab in the top navigation). Available for purchase are shoes sporting colors from seven high school teams. I have a hard time believing there is a large market for these shoes, and am curious to understand why Nike hasn’t expanded this offering to the professional arena.
At the end of the process I was pleased with my creation and happy to show it off, and (not including an actual sale) that’s the ultimate goal isn’t it? Now if Nike can conjure up some marketing magic to convince me to spend $95.00 on a pair of shoes…
Puma Mongolian Shoe BBQ
Puma takes a similar approach to its shoe customization. It gets “clever points” for taking the idea and treating it like a BBQ. Your shoe gets grilled up with all the ingredients you want. It’s cute and an interesting way to differentiate itself from the competition. Nike, by comparison, seems rather un-imaginative. With that being said, the Puma Mongolian Shoe BBQ did not seem as “professional” as Nike’s site. The layout isn’t as clean, and I found myself spoiled by Nike when I couldn’t hover over, and click on the part of the shoe that I wanted to customize.
The presentation of the product was also a concern. Certain views of the shoe (the left side in particular) aren’t lit very well. I found myself reaching to increase the brightness on my monitor only to discover it was simply the quality of the image. The fact that the product is digitally rendered is also a big issue. Unlike Nike–which featured a real, brightly lit product–Puma’s shoe is very clearly not real. The zoom feature is thereby pointless (and relatively ineffective anyway) as it doesn’t allow the costumer to appreciate the craftsmanship or textures any more than usual. This issue is especially pressing considering Puma’s differentiation from Nike, which lies in the large array of materials and textures available to the customer. Where Nike allows for only ten color options, Puma has seventeen components to their shoes and as many as thirty different materials. With more emphasis on material than color, it is Puma that should be showcasing a real shoe, so the customer can see the fabric as it would look in real life, as opposed to a computer rendering.
This probably speaks more to Puma’s target market, but I found myself unsatisfied with the options provided me. Thirty different fabrics are impressive, but I had no choice over their color. I was unable to reproduce a similar shoe to the one I customized with Nike, as the colors weren’t available to me. Most of the options were wild or “loud,” ranging from pink to spring green, to purple, and the colors varied from each part of the shoe to the other (preventing a customer from creating an all-green or all-purple shoe). But there can be no doubt that these shoes are extremely unique. While I was able to customize my Nike shoe almost exactly the way I wanted it, the final product may not necessarily be that drastically different from a product already available on the market. But, 
for a customer seeking that small slice of almost complete uniqueness, Puma delivers.
The Mongolian Shoe BBQ site also includes the ability to mail the shoe design to a friend. While this does provide away to showcase the design–and more importantly, Puma’s product–it isn’t as effective as Nike’s approach. E-mailing the shoe to a friend seems more like a task for someone who has been talking about customizing a Puma shoe with a friend: “Oh by the way, here’s that shoe I was talking about.” But that’s where the advertising ends. By posting the shoe to MySpace or Facebook, Nike has essentially set up a billboard on the customer’s page, viewable to every single passerby. To get the same kind of exposure, the Puma customer would need to e-mail the same number of people. That’s not exactly a plausible reality.
The ability to build your shoe in-store is an exceptionally nice touch. While the store locations are understandably limited, I’m sure many a customer would prefer picking out the materials and mixing and matching components in person. It’s a great translation from web personalization to the real world (which is often more difficult). It would be nice to see more Puma locations do this.
Both Nike and Puma utilized Adobe Flash to create a highly interactive environment that allowed for a lot of bells and whistles, and above all, customization of their products. My only concern with Flash is its inability to give the user physical pages. For example, because all the site pages are housed within the Flash file, a user that tries to save or point to a specific page (i.e. Puma’s “What is Mongolian BBQ?” page) will find that they will always be directed to the homepage. This isn’t a tremendous worry by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly something to think about as customers may go beyond wanting to show off their shoes, and try to show off the site features as well. Both websites successfully used the available technology to offer their customers mass customization in simple, easy to understand processes. Both Nike and Puma realize how the modern consumer has come to expect more, and have successfully adapted by allowing the inspiration for products to travel from the outside, in.
Tags: case study, mass customization, Nike iD, Puma Mongolian Shoe BBQ