How a week-in-the-life study helped a sports brand understand young mens training routines and what sportswear brands they favoured.

Our client specialised in providing up-to-date insights and strategies in the retail industry. They were approached by a leading sportswear brand who needed to understand more about the training routines of young male athletes. Whilst the brand was long established and cited young males amongst their key target, they found that they really hadn’t much data on them as a specific group.

Our client was tasked with gaining an insight into how this particular demographic viewed sports brands and how they interacted with them in their daily routines.

The Challenge

If seemed like easy research. Our client wanted to know more about young males who followed intensive training schedules in order to tailor a particular sports brands products. A young, engaged and motivated cohort seemed like they would be willing to participate in studies which were both interesting and important to them.

But in reality, they were finding the opposite in their efforts to engage respondents. Whilst sending researchers to training facilities to observe young athletes garnered some interesting insights, it was missing the bigger picture of how their training regimes were integrated with the rest of their lives. In many cases, these young athletes were balancing studies, work, personal lives and various other commitments with their training. This is what made recruiting and co-ordinating such studies a major challenge.

Adding to this challenge was that each individual respondent was following different timetables. This would often involve training sessions starting and ending in the early hours of the morning, in various locations, making such projects a logistical nightmare for researchers.

The Goals

Our clients objectives were to:

Embed themselves in the lives of young, male athletes to understand how their training routines integrated with the rest of their lives
Understand what brands of sportswear these athletes preferred
Discover who was influencing and motivating young male athletes to succeed

23 Respondents

8 Tasks

1 Week

Tasking Strategy: Scheduled Tasking

The Solution

After discovering Indeemo, our client felt that the digital ethnography approach may allow them to eliminate some of the hurdles they were encountering in their efforts. By giving respondents a set of simple tasks to complete on their mobiles, they were eliminating much of the time and logistical challenges they were facing.

Working with Indeemo, our client created 20 tasks that respondents would need to complete as part of a week-long research diary. By using Indeemo’s scheduled-tasking option, our client was able to drip-feed the tasks to respondents throughout the week. This was particularly useful as it avoided burdening already time-poor respondents with a long list of questions or tasks.

Over the course of the week, respondents received push-notifications to alert them when they needed to complete a task. This meant that they could receive tasks first thing in the morning as they went about their day, allowing them to upload in the moment, in-context snapshots of their training routines.

By using a familiar social-media style app, young respondents were comfortable with sharing their lives and experiences. Many of the respondents even noted during the project that they used Instagram and Facebook to share their training progress, making Indeemo a completely natural platform for gaining an authentic insight into young athletes behaviours and motivations.

If you’re looking to understand more about how a sports or fitness brand can use diary-studies to understand their young athletes, please get in touch.

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There is no more impactful way to present your insights during a client debrief than by utilizing video footage of respondents in their natural setting, explaining the conclusions drawn from your analysis.

Our clients have successfully employed Video Diary Studies utilizing autoethnography, targeting respondents of all ages, from 8 to 80, in both Business-to-Consumer and Business-to-Business contexts.

If your client's requirements include an increased use of video, please submit your information here and we will promptly reach out to discuss potential use cases that can help accomplish their goals.