Purdue grad Byron Young, manager of city analytics at Nike, returned to campus in 2019 to share his career story with students at the Krannert Executive Forum. (Photo by Kevin Boucher)
Analytics Abound
Byron Young brings his data skills to Nike
Spring 2020
By Eric Nelson
Perhaps the only thing brighter than Byron Young’s smile and gold-and-black Nikes is his future. As manager of city analytics at the iconic sports apparel company, Young (BSM ’12) is putting both his management degree and entrepreneurship certificate to work by using a data-driven approach to make the leap to new markets and consumers.
During his eight-year career, Young has held professional positions that require him to transform data, consumer insights and analytics into proper marketing techniques. He is currently the manager of city & territory analytics at Nike. This role requires him to sift through data, identify critical information, develop hypotheses and make recommendations to senior leadership, all things he finds rewarding and interesting.
“Consumers give us a lot of information, but you need data analytics to understand it,” Young says.
Young believes innovation is critical to further his company's brand and support the growth of his teammates. “I enjoy the ability to identify areas of opportunity and build a cross-functional plan to deliver results for the team,” he says. “I love to brainstorm, find patterns in data and then bring those strategies to life in the retail world.”
As a leader, Young has taken the initiative of discovering and implementing new marketing strategies throughout his career. Working for Target upon graduation from Purdue, Young was the first to suggest they carry big & tall apparel to gain market share.
Using his knowledge of strategic management, he then went on to create the first inventory planning team at Mad Engine, saving the company millions of dollars in inventory. That eventually led him to Nike, where he has the opportunity to analyze product positioning to best appeal to the needs of the consumers.
Young’s experiences after Purdue are great examples of an intrapreneur — an innovative employee who rises in their career not only because of hard work, but also because of an ability to think critically and creatively.
“I boil it down to two things,” Young says. “My first piece is to really look at marketplace information and sales data. The second is to look at consumer data. Who are the customers? Where do they live? How much money do they make? What do they look like? Is the city growing?”
One example of Nike’s focus on the consumer is a sneakers app that allows users to purchase shoes from their phone. By examining the data behind the app, Young can help Nike identify and evaluate potential new markets or demographics.
“For example, we found a particular area code in Chicago that was always over-indexing a particular style of running shoe,” he says. “It turns out there was a retailer in that location that had closed. The consumers were still there, but they didn’t have any distribution.”
Still, it’s about more than the data, Young cautions.
“We routinely get out into the market,” he says. “We'll go every other week, visit stores, talk to people shopping there. What are you looking for? What technology is influencing your decisions? The challenge is making sure you don’t forget the customer when you’re looking at the data.”
