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2. Market Opportunity
Everything in today’s world is getting digital and e-commerce is playing critical role across all the industry segments. In the marathon industry, most of the digital players are primarily into apparel business or blogging websites that contains the training tips. There are very few portals where all the marathon events are listed out and it primarily contains the detail composed in the flyers such as date, time, venue, eligibility criteria and contact details. Registration for such events has to happen through the exclusive website or through manual process. Considering the current landscape of Indian market, this study plans to do detail study to understand the needs of the runners and then map it against the available resources to find the gap.
2.1. Runner’s Needs
To get a better understanding of the runner’s need, personal interview was done with two candidates who started running accidentally for some reasons and now excelling as a great marathon runner as well as an influencer for lot of newcomers. Refer to the Appendix A.1 Runner’s Interview for more details. Based on that strong networking with other runners is a basic requirement for beginners to start with. It is very difficult to get trained for completing 40+ km all by themselves. They need to acquire the required knowledge and right techniques for effective participation. Though there are lot of articles online, finding the reliable information is not an easy one. To overcome this, most of the people enroll themselves with a running club or groups. Running club is the only way before a decade to get connected, but now social media like Facebook makes forming a virtual group and communicating among themselves an easy process and save all their time and money. Considering this migration factor, all the running clubs are already listed in Facebook pages with huge fans and followers.
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Another underlying reason behind all the runners is fitness and healthy lifestyle. They have a strong urge to know more about “how to improve their lifestyle in a natural and healthy way”
and tends to search for new relevant information. However, these information scattered across the internet and segregating the right one that is reliable among the commercial articles were really hard. Most of these runners follow the directions or guidance provided by the local mentors or influencers from the running group whom they see as an expert runner.
Since the energy burnt will be very huge on a daily basis, Nutrional fueling is very important for marathon to keep the practice going on. In the digital world, most of these information were on international standard and it’s really hard to find localized data based on the Indian diet and food style. (Indian food is diversified across all the states). Again the mentor or influencer will be key to provide valuable suggestions which urges the runner to join some local running club to begin with. The same reason applies for getting better understanding on the tools, training techniques etc. to prepare themselves.
As far as the event registration considered, most of these runners would like to go through their running clubs as a group for easy processing. Recent days, almost all the events provide online registration facility however some offline procedures are required to collect the running kit before the race starts and hence they still prefer to go through their clubs. If they do it through the local running clubs, they will have a known company before landing up in a massive ground with 10,000+ runners on the event day. Runners would like to get exclusive updates on event communications like newsletter, alerts, and remainders to their personal email id.
One of the basic need which is not yet addressed by any digital platform is that, up on race completion these runners can see their timing and achievement details from the respective
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timing provider websites. However they can’t store all their achievements and timing details in a single place. Some runners personally keep a track and save it in their own way and tends to hold this information for some period or download it from their GSM watches like Garmin which provide this feature.
From the above information, it is obvious that the runners tend to gather information from various sources through different channel for the current needs and actively use social media as an alternative to fill the gaps whenever needed.
2.2. Organizer’s Needs
On the other hand, being a marathon event organizers they need tremendous effort in promoting the event to get the maximum reach so that the corporates associated with them will feel the value of being part of it. Almost all the events are non-profitable, the fund generated out of these events will be diverted to social trust, charity or for noble cause to create some awareness in society for example pink marathon event was conducted to spread awareness about breast cancer. Hence promoting these events are really challenging and attracting the large participants is the key goal for an organizers.
Though these events last only six hours at the maximum, it needs huge manpower for event preparation. Key challenges associated with this preparation were legal procedure in getting the required permit, event promotion, social media communication, registration, time management, gather volunteers to support, medical facility arrangement, vendor management like t-shirts, RFID provider for timing, food service, janitor service and many more. World class event’s organizers have enough resources capable of executing the entire stream, however for local or standard events they really find it hard to execute this with limited available resources and
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hence end up in spending too much of cost and contribute only very little to the charity or society. These organizers looking for effective solutions to optimize the cost with single stop service so that they can execute events effectively and reach their goal of maximum contribution to society.
2.3. Opportunities
The current state of market has too many scattered information on various websites in different formats. Each event has its own registration process and there is no standard defined process or e-application without any physical visit. Current channel strongly rely on Facebook now and market is looking for an exclusive place to effectively reach the right audience and serve them in a better way.
It’s time for a niche portal to dominate the running industry that can exclusively target the segment needs and serve the runners more effectively. Even in retail industry, it’s proven that global player like Amazon was easily overtook by FlipKart, Snapdeal, Yatra so on. Hence a portal with localized information such as Indian nutrional diet, running gadgets review by reliable runners from nearby locality, tips based on the local weather conditions etc. were strongly preferred rather than global information.
All the runners dream about having a single platform where all their running related needs can be addressed effectively that includes training information, diet, marathon events, registration, timing details, marathon gadgets review, store all their achievement and timing records etc.
They seeks virtual place to network effectively with co-runners and prefer to have a runner’s book, an exclusive place for runners rather depending entirely on social media.
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