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CASE STUDY How Sportswear brand, Mizuno, toned up online performance via enhanced personalisation

Mizuno: personalisation grew global sales

Mizuno: personalisation grew global sales

International sportswear brand Mizuno has improved online personalisation to increase shopper engagement and drive sales as its customer base has shifted online.

Founded in Osaka, Japan in 1906, Mizuno crafts high-quality equipment and apparel for a wide range of sports, including running, football, golf, swimming, tennis, and netball.  With its heritage in creating innovative sportswear – from engineering the running spikes that broke the 100m world record for 100m 1991 to creating a specially designed football boot for the 2002 FIFA World Cup – Mizuno’s mission is to promote and support athletes’ advancement and achievement in sport.

As it caters for a wide variety of sporting disciplines, Mizuno’s customer demographics vary considerably between each sport they represent, making its target audience diverse. Because of this, the brand recognised the need to engage with new and potential customers in a more personalised way – especially as consumer behaviour and demand for sporting goods increased dramatically in 2020 as the pandemic took hold. 

As lockdowns closed gyms and cancelled grass-root team sports, the nation turned to home workouts and sales of online fitness equipment and apparel soared.  High-end online exercise and bike firm, Peloton, announced earlier this month that it had passed $1billion in sales in the last quarter, while downloads of fitness apps grew by 46% globally in 2020.

To capitalise on this emerging consumer behaviour and underpin its D2C trading strategy, Mizuno partnered with Wunderkind to use the tech firms real-time identity network – a technology that helps retailers better recognise a larger portion of site traffic, across new and returning users, in order to enhance personalisation.  Using intent-based triggers, Mizuno was able to deliver the right message to the right customer, at the right time.

This enabled the sports brand to better target their current customers, driving them to shopping baskets quicker, while focusing on key eCommerce KPIs, such as AOV and conversion rate.  It also helped Mizuno build out their CRM and increase their active customer base, improving customer engagement.  For new shoppers, Wunderkind’s solution delivered 13k opt-ins in just three months and enhanced user experience after sign-up by showing users personalised interactions.

Wunderkind is now Mizuno’s fifth largest channel in terms of online revenue, while the sports brand has seen a seven-fold return on investment. 

Amarena Diaz, Director of Digital Marketing & eCommerce at Mizuno, explains: “The right marketing mix is the key to attracting and connecting with our various audiences across our growing list of sport categories as a global brand.  To support this, activating personalisation and enhancing targeting will continue to be a top priority.  Wunderkind helps us to accelerate these processes.” 

Diaz adds: “Wunderkind has enabled us to capitalise on the shift in consumer behaviour we’ve seen during the pandemic to drive significant revenue for our business.”

Danielle Auerbach, Senior Director of Customer Success at Wunderkind, says: “A lean and agile team, Mizuno has ambitious plans for this year and beyond.  During the COVID pandemic, we helped Mizuno to identify and capitalise on changes in user behaviour.  Behaviour-based triggered emails and automated features on the website made it easier to adapt to unexpected changes.  Going forward, Mizuno can feel confident in their ability to adapt quickly when needed and drive business growth.”

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