Nike Fuel: marketing or mindfuck?
It’s not often that the power of an idea and the way it’s presented manages to blast its way past all my cynicism and take root in the scorched wasteland of what passes for my soul after over a decade of working in marketing.
Everyone who returned from SxSW was raving about it. Ben Cooper wrote a post about it. And the presentation by RG/A North America’s chief creative officer Nick Law at Circus – about Nike+ FuelBand – excited me to the point that I was scribbling down his every word, and more importantly, the pleasure centres in my brain were screaming WANT at the sight of the Fuelband’s sleek lines and elegant rubber curves.
I’m going to go out on a limb to say this is the most sophisticated piece of mindfuckery of the 21st century.
Add a little GPS tracking and it could revolutionise the way retailers measure footfall and customer browsing.
that’s the 400th time i’ve read ‘dystopian’ this week
I still want one…and a Grill’d burger.
“and you can only access it (motivation) through buying products” You sure about that?
Couldn’t get past that opening sentence.
I’m still not really sure what it is, but I want one…
“anti-disintermediation”
Mind. Blown.
REd DWarf was my favourite “This-could-happen-in-your-future-Life” programme.
Love the piece! Love the idea of “what passes for a soul”. HATE “anti-disintermediation”. Therefore one mark off. 9 out of 10. Fascinating stuff, authoritative tone.
S
I was there – Nick Law’s talk at Circus. Equally as awed, taken aback.
And, I want one. This costly piece of plastic, is essentially a stylised pedometer which links up to the digiworld. But it is ever so stylish, ever so today and is a beacon of power, call it what “fuel”, something beyond the everyday, whilst doing the everyday. Genius.
Hold your head between your knees – I predict this thing will blow everyone away with its launch.
Beam me up, Scotty.
Buy Fuelband so you can buy *into* it, sure, but don’t expect much in terms of true training/physical activity feedback.
i’ve been wearing the Fuelband for a few weeks and by about week 2, the basic disconnect between gamified “Fuel Points” and any real physicial metric starts to get tiring.
Fuel Points don’t relate to calories burned in any consistent way. It doesn’t detect if you’re at the gym, and lifting weights or doing pull-ups give the same points as raising a pint glass.
It’s a remarkable marketing move, agreed, to move beyond apparel & shoes and sell data back to customers, but it’s currently a less-than-perfect “anti-product”. I wouldn’t expect to see many people wearing these after week 4.
@ Beezlebub
It’s been around a long time, must be its turn for an airing.
John Stuart Mill – and I think it was around even before him. Orwell should have used it, probably did. I lived in it once for a short while, not very pleasant.
I use Pulchritude a lot, much nicer word.
Personally I have been using a less glamourous but far more useful gadget by Adidas called micoach – its absolutely brilliant and combines a pedometer and heart rate monitoring to actually spur you into action.
It hasn’t been marketed anywhere near as well as Nike Fuel, but its a much better system…
Nice piece Cathie. Have you seen this similar product by Jawbone? The Up bracelet. http://jawbone.com/up
Bought one at SXSW and love it, already up to 100,000 fuel (for what that matters?). My wife’s fuelband, on the other hand, broke on the flight back. We were told by Nike customer service that we can’t get a replacement because we life in Australia, and that we shouldn’t buy things from other countries that aren’t available in our own.
Moral of the story is, all the great product development and advertising in the world means nothing if your customer service staff are robots that blindly follow rules.
Put a Nike logo on it and it’s different.
I believe, happy to be corrected if I’m wrong, the Hot chip technology for Quicksilver was the first. Although it was confined to snowboarding and surfing, the community aspect was pretty good. You can even track your waves via GPS.
I have seen Jawbone also.
There is a lot of similar tech out there – just not launched by Nike – therefore not as big.
This is repackaging, with a Nike logo on it and then advertised properly.
@me
Ever heard of the ‘third to market*’ rule? You don’t want to be first, you want to be third, so you can learn from the mistakes and launch in a really big, really cool way.
(*Somebody credit my reference please?)
meh
I had also seen the similarities to the “merits” in Black Mirror ep2. A bit frightening…