The Science Behind Nike’s Appeal to Millennial Women

The Science Behind Nike’s Appeal to Millennial Women

Twenty years ago, a woman looking for a decent pair of running shoes was limited to pilfering the men’s section to find the right fit. Forget design, early athletic styles were itchy, baggy and generally unflattering.

Fast forward to 2015 and the market for women’s athletic-inspired apparel has extended beyond the gym and taken to the streets as women lead increasingly more active lives.

In this week’s brand spotlight, we take a look at a sample of Nike’s female audience. Through interest-based segmentation derived from digital data, we are able to learn more about the passions, interests and considerations that motivate Nike’s female fans.

To understand the audience, we ingested a sample of 10,000 followers of @Nike. With the data collected, we were able to pull additional data from across the digital landscape.

With data normalization techniques, we identified hotspots including LA, New York, Chicago and Boston.


By extracting language and hashtags from within the sample audience, we identified the top hashtags Nike’s female fans used. Hashtags like “#RunChat” and “#BibChat” indicate the audience enjoys working out and getting fit with friends. In addition, the majority of hashtags are run-centric, falling in line with a wider trend sweeping the country of the rising popularity of running clubs and groups.

Hashtags and trends reflect the kinds of people that exist within the larger customer base. A quick look at the top discovered personas, two distinct groups emerge. Both segments are largely comprised of women within the millennial age group, but after looking at the top interests per group, the two need very different things and purchase from Nike for different reasons. On the one hand is a more family-oriented millennial. On the other hand, 19% of the audience appears to be more of a young professional group.

The role of athletics and fitness in people’s lives have dramatically changed over the past few years. With sales on the rise, it is more important than ever for brands like Nike to understand nuanced interest and affinities in order to tailor campaigns that resonate deeply with a thoroughly modern audience.

Find out how we collected and analyzed this data with a demo of the People Pattern platform.