If you remember Adidas had recently acquired Runstastic which already had a mega fan following – 100 million users – when it was acquired. Ever since Adidas bought this banner back in 2015 for $238 million, it has been concentrating its efforts on boosting its fitness tech niche.
Runtastic has a very central role in the business strategy for Adidas. Hence, Adidas is keen to work on its fitness development energies around this app. In context to this, only last month Adidas closed down its miCoach app in favor of Runtastic.
According to Engadget, the officials at Adidas believe that the next step towards boosting Runtastic is collaborating with third parties to create more “personalized” workout and fitness technology experiences for its users.
According to Adidas not every athlete has the same approach to work out; we try out best to customize fitness experiences according to various kinds of individuals and according to the evolving needs of athletes. For incorporating diversity in one app, Adidas will have to collaborate and open its data, content and technology to third party devices.
Adidas has still not mentioned the names of third party firms it will be collaborating with or any other details such as how deep the partnerships will be etc.
This vision of various brands operating together to benefit the users is unique in the fitness tech market. It signifies that Adidas recognizes the strengths of other tech brands and understands that users need diverse features and functions which cannot be satisfied by one party.
Stacey Burr, VP of wearable sports electronics at Adidas narrated that, “It’s not just about, ‘Can we develop a new piece of hardware that is a standalone Adidas ecosystem. You’ll be seeing that we’ll be opening up a bunch of our content and know-how to other third party devices, and [making] it more of an open platform scenario so that we can extend onto other people’s devices as well.”
Burr emphasized that no single fitness wearable or activity tracker is perfect for everyone or caters all the needs. Hence, the idea to let Runtastic support third party wearables will prove to be an effective strategy to bring people together.
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