How Puma Measures Success Across New Tech

Puma has some previous experience connecting with new and existing audiences in novel ways.

The 75-year-old sportswear brand has worked on Web3 tactics like NFTs (nonfungible tokens), artificial intellgience, metaverse platforms like Roblox and virtual reality, partnering with Meta in January on fitness experience The World’s Smallest Gym on Apple’s Vision Pro headset in its Berlin flagship store.

This activity has built it a reputation with early technology adopters that it’s willing to embrace new platforms, said Ivan Dashkov, the company’s head of emerging technology and media, speaking on stage at ADWEEK’s Commerceweek New York. That growing buzz helps it get buy-in internally to drive investment in new tech and platforms.

Puma has run several NFT drops that have sold out (during a bear market for these digital collectibles), releasing 10,000 Super Puma NFTs that sold out in 38 minutes in one drop.

The brand has also run two Roblox experiences so far. Its second was the highest-ratest experience on Roblox, with a 90% approval rating, said Dashkov, adding that 4 million people have claimed its digital goods.

“We have this younger audience wearing Puma gear in their digital experience—that’s what we want to see,” he said, adding that the success metrics in these metaverse platforms are often akin to those in physical stores, including key performance indicators like how many people visited, what areas they gravitate to and how long they spend there.

But there’s some leap between selling digital goods and selling sneakers. The challenges in measuring, for now, are reminiscent of the early days of social media: There is no common success metric across emerging tech and platforms, so the brand needs to be expansive and nimble in what it measures.

“We’re testing and learning, and sometimes we fail, and that’s OK—it’s part of the process,” Dashkov added, explaining that KPIs need constant adjustments, eliminating those that don’t work or adding new ones.

Creating relevant social commerce platforms

At social commerce platform Emcee, which launched July 2021, people can exchange ideas, goods and inspiration, and the goal is to turn influential and creative people into retailers. It measures success across three buckets: getting buy-in from talent and brand partners; ensuring that people build meaningful relationships on a social platform around what interests them; and breaking new talent and brands, giving them the tools to build an audience and be culturally relevant.

Hitting all of those ultimately ladders up to driving sales, said John Aghayan, founder and CEO.

“If you are culturally relevant, the sales will come,” said Aghayan. “Go for the why and everything then [flows to] sales.”

Over the past two years, platforms like Facebook and Instagram have rolled back social commerce efforts, while TikTok Shop is receiving plenty of interest from buyers, but success is still nascent and sporadic. Partly, that skepticism comes from platforms trying to retrofit commerce into a platform not initially designed for it. And, as marketers know all too well, changing user behavior can be a difficult and lengthy process.

“Big Tech has a lot of walled gardens, that’s a big learning,” said Aghayan. “We are on a mission to slowly bring them down one by one. It’s difficult and challenging to work within those closed ecosystems.”

For Puma, that challenge can be alleviated by choosing the right, trusted partners to work with, said Dashkov.

Another challenge in embracing new tech, he added, is getting buy-in from the wider organization. For Puma, it faced issues working on NFTs in getting the finance department to accept the brand taking cryptocurrency.

“But our slogan is, ‘Forever Faster,’ so I always go back to that,” he said. “We have to keep pushing the envelope to be an innovative brand.”