Although I hate the pompousness of the Jeep ad, Chrysler deserves some credit for admitting that they made crappy vehicles for a while and making a reasonable-sounding claim about their product (“It is well made and it is designed to work.”). On the other hand, GM merely evokes a history that has nothing to do with their cars while ignoring the five decades (and the $49.5 billion bailout) that have come and gone since then. Cynically, they also perpetuate the false impression that “Made in America” means “Made by middle-aged white men”.

A counterpoint

I’m really proud of this spread in the 2010 Zipp catalog. Instead of just waving the red-white-and-blue, Zipp wanted to talk about the practical benefits of making their products in America. And instead of only showing workers who look like their customers (who also happen to be middle-aged white men), Zipp gladly showed the Latina women who are an important part of the company’s workforce.

It might not have sold a ton of wheels, but I think this spread says a lot about the people I get to work with at Zipp.

WELCOME TO SPEEDWAY. About halfway between Kona and l’Alpe d’Huez sits a flat little town with a world-famous auto race. Admittedly, Speedway, Indiana is far removed from the annals of cycling and triathlon lore. But for over 20 years, our hometown has been a hotbed of the motorsports composites industry and continues to attract advanced technologies and talented engineers. So it’s no accident that Zipp was born and raised here, or that every Zipp wheel is still made by individually trained Zipp employees in our facility in Speedway.

So, when we talk about where Zipp products come from, it’s not about politics. It’s about the advantages of integrating manufacturing with design, engineering, and testing. Doing everything in-house gives us flexibility to develop new products efficiently and release them with shorter lead times. It allows us to keep a close eye on quality control and provide superior customer service. Ultimately, having all these functions under one roof enables Zipp to make the world’s fastest wheels and components.

A side note

I really enjoyed this ad for the Nissan Leaf. I can’t remember the last time I saw a sponsor portray Lance in a way that regular cyclists can relate to.

Now I see this ad differently but I’m still not convinced.

Despite the formidable legend of its namesake, Eddy Merckx Cycles NV is a small company. When Sobradis NV acquired a majority stake from Eddy in October 2008, the company had annual revenues of 6 million Euro (about 8 million USD at the time) and 20 employees. The brand has grown since then – now with 25 employees and soon moving to a larger facility – but it’s hardly setting the bike industry on fire.

But they’re competing with companies 50-100 times their size, so what’s Merckx supposed to do? They could run ads with studio shots of a bike or a picture of a sponsored athlete winning a race. But if you flip through a few back issues of VeloNews and ROAD like I just did, you’ll see that just about every ad for a bike brand follows one of these formats. There’s no way that Merckx could take the typical approach and hope to stand out meaningfully from the crowd.

If you’re small, you do what you have to do to get attention.

In this new campaign, Merckx has opted for shock value and done a good job of executing the main visual element. It freaked me out at first, but now I’m warming up to its sincerity. Merckx clearly understands that they have no choice but to shake things up. Plus, my friend Michael Tabtabai is a fan. But what is the ad actually saying? The combination of “I Am Tiger Woods” and “proud sponsor of blah blah blah” communicates nothing about why anyone should buy the bike.

WE’RE ALL CANNIBALS falls into the trap of telling consumers that pro cyclists are just like us. I’ve written before about what I call “postmodern road cycling”, which is basically the recognition that the average cyclist experiences the sport in a way completely different from, say, Tom Boonen. In fact, I think most of us experience pretty much everything differently from Tom Boonen.

Now imagine if the tagline said WE’RE STILL CANNIBALS. Changing that single word adds a promise to keep tradition alive and a respect for the consumer (“we know that you know that Eddy sold the company”) without implying the falsehood that my riding experience is anything like Tom Boonen’s . WE’RE STILL CANNIBALS would relaunch the brand with a stronger sense of history and an aggressive outlook to the future.

I don’t know about you, but that’s what I want to see from the company founded by the greatest bike racer of all time.

On the website for its clever People For Bikes campaign (sign the pledge!), Bikes Belong – the industry’s sponsored lobbying and advocacy organization – says, “Bikes keep us healthy, carry us from point A to point B, save us from high gas prices, and make our air cleaner and our roads less congested.”

But Schwinn and its parent company, Dorel, apparently aren’t trying to change the world. Says Andrew Coccari, Chief Marketing Officer for Dorel Recreational/Leisure, “Our core message is that life is hectic and stressful, and Schwinn products are designed to help you get back on a slower track, enjoying time with family and friends in a healthful and restorative activity.”

Within this vision of bicycling, there’s nothing wrong with hopping in the Hummer and drive half-a-mile to pick up a carton of milk. But then again, Schwinn isn’t your average bike company. Most of its sales come from mass retailers like Wal-Mart; IBDs (bike shops) are a smaller part of its business, even if Dorel is planning to increase it.

But getting back to the ads – which will run in magazines like Parenting and on cable TV – they’re quite good. Dorel and their agency, Cossette New York, have clearly done their homework. The campaign is targeted at women 25-54 because, according to Coccari, “while purchase decision and ability to really connect with family aren’t feelings exclusive to women, women are the chief purchasing officer of the family.” If that’s the goal, I can see an ad like this working pretty well.

The online portions are weaker, in my opinion. RideSchwinn.com shows the brand’s entire line but some models fall outside the whimsical, nostalgic, suburban nature of the campaign – i.e. the fixies are out of place. The “Bike Finder” could be a lot simpler. Social media links are out of date and off-topic; the latest blog post is from November 2008 and the YouTube channel is focused on electric bikes.

Still, it’s a solid campaign overall, even if it’s not exactly the bicycle revolution dreamt of by many in the industry and the advocacy community.

At the most basic level, his thesis is that the bicycle industry should emulate the general consumer products industry and shift from “exclusive” to “inclusive” products. In support, he draws the following analogies:

Although his presentation compares bicycles to everything from iPods to electric shavers, Sanders himself wrote in a comment on BikeRadar that one of his preferred yardsticks is the humble microwave. That, he claims, is what the bicycle should be like: functionally simple, readily available, and designed for everyone.

In a sense, what Sanders is calling for is less about changing the product than it is about changing the culture and distribution of the bike industry. Instead of focusing innovation resources on high-end bikes sold to enthusiasts through specialty retailers, the best technologies and the brightest minds in the bike industry should be working on improving the low-cost bikes available through mass-market channels.

Some really smart, innovative people are quite taken with this idea, and I’ve had the opportunity to interview and work with a couple of them (Antonio Bertone and Rob Forbes). In those conversations, the impression that’s stuck with me is that the number of people for whom bicycles make sense represents a much, much, much bigger market than the number of people who will ever think of themselves as “real cyclists”.

Or as Sanders puts it, “There are no microwave enthusiasts.”

Although this piece isn’t really about major bike industry brands like Scott, this shift in their messaging from the 2009 (left) to 2010 VeloNews Buyer’s Guides is perhaps related.

At the time that the 2009 ad would have been due, Scott was just starting their sponsorship and might not have had a chance to do a photo shoot with the team now known as HTC-Columbia. Scott still chose a racing & performance theme for the ad. A year later, they kept an element of performance (lightweight) but went with comfort and a non-racer (i.e. a VeloNews reader), even after Columbia’s 86-win season.

COLUMN

This piece appears in the current issue of ROAD Magazine that’s been out for a couple of weeks. It was written in October 2009.

A business theorist named Peter Drucker once wrote that an enterprise has two essential functions: marketing and innovation. Until quite recently, this philosophy dominated the segment of the bike industry that focuses on road cyclists who could be described as “moderate-to-heavy users”. However, there now seems to be a backlash against the innovation part of Drucker’s dictum as newly influential players emphasize nostalgia rather than performance. But how far will this new aesthetic carry them?

The notion that serious cyclists want increasingly high-performance equipment underpins how high-end cycling products are developed and promoted. It’s an arms race to create the lightest, fastest, most aerodynamic merchandise and sign the most successful athletes to endorse it. We’ll call this the modernist approach. As a result of it, we see things like the massive reshuffling of teams and bike sponsors that took place last year (2008) and the deluge of slick time trial bikes that inundated us this year (2009).

Not surprisingly, the messages from these companies pretty much boil down to, “buy this and win.” There’s probably such an ad on the page opposite this column. Of course, the industry knows that the majority of serious cyclists don’t race, at least not formally. Nonetheless, the common assumption has been that these consumers desire the same qualities in their bikes, components, and accessories as professional racers do. But this assumption is eroding.

Welcome to postmodern road cycling.

This new aesthetic – shaped by Rapha, Embrocation Magazine, the North American Handmade Bicycle Show, and others – is not a merely rejection of the ubiquitous modernist aesthetic. No one is advocating a return to toe clips and down tube shifters. Instead, the postmodern view of the sport filters the most evocative, iconic elements of cycling’s past through an artistic lens.

So, while cycling’s modernism lives in the present with the stars of today and looks to the features and technologies of tomorrow, postmodernism aims to be timeless. And it’s striking a chord.

I see two significant factors enabling this trend. First is the recognition that the modernist approach is disconnected from the ways in which most people actually ride. The values that it embodies – competition and technology – are still relevant. But perhaps more so are the things that modernism eschews – camaraderie and simplicity. It’s this emphasis that allows postmodernism to deemphasize Drucker-esque innovation.

At the same time, legitimate innovation in the road cycling market is harder and harder to achieve. After a flurry of advancements a few years ago, it’s now possible to buy an inexpensive, unbranded carbon frame from Asia that’s lighter and stiffer than pretty much every frame that was ever produced prior to around 2006. Consumers know this.

These factors open the door for postmodernism, which in turn opens doors for new definitions of what it means to be a serious cyclist, which in turn open doors for more people to become serious cyclists. Additionally, postmodernism has low barriers to entry. It takes a lot less money to shoot beautiful pictures of epic riding than it does to sponsor a ProTour team.

The sum of all these elements is a sense of nostalgia like the one that was famously described on Mad Men as, “a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone… It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.” If it can maintain that feeling, cycling’s postmodern aesthetic has the potential to cause a significant shift in how the bike industry approaches both marketing and innovation.

1995 – Trek and Greg LeMond begin a licensing agreement where Trek will design, produce, and distribute a line of bikes with the LeMond name. Trek retains all the intellectual property.

1999 – Trek and LeMond extend the contract shortly after Lance’s first Tour win. The deal was set to run through 2010.

2001 – LeMond begins to publicly question the cleanliness of Lance Armstrong’s Tour de France victories.

2004 – Trek alleges that LeMond’s statements about Armstrong are a violation of their contract; LeMond sues Trek to keep them from terminating the licensing agreement.

2007 – Trek reportedly informs LeMond that they will not extend the agreement when it expires in 2010.

2008 – LeMond sues Trek again, claiming that Trek did not “exert their best efforts regarding the LeMond brand” as the contract stipulated. Trek countersues, arguing that LeMond’s statements about Armstrong damaged both brands and that LeMond was circumventing Trek dealers by selling his personal allotment of bikes on the gray market.

Last week – Trek’s argument is essentially unchanged from the 2008 countersuit; LeMond’s is basically that his statements about Armstrong did not violate the Trek agreement because they were true. As the trial begins, the judge encourages Trek and LeMond to settle out of court before things get any uglier.

My thoughts.

LeMond could have tempered his statements about Armstrong and Trek could have put more resources into the LeMond brand. Neither of those things happened because there wasn’t much incentive for either party to salvage the relationship once it soured. Much as been made of LeMond’s personal grudges, litigiousness, and questionable dealings in other business endeavors. But in my view, what doomed the Trek-LeMond partnership was a simple twist of fate.

Back in 1995, the chance of another American cyclist winning the Tour de France on a Trek would have seemed slim, if not preposterous. After all, no team had ever ridden an American bike in the Tour and the top US prospect (a certain Lance Armstrong) wasn’t thought of as a Grand Tour contender.

But once the improbable happened with an inspirational comeback story as an added bonus, there was no way that Trek could pursue the massive opportunity of its association with Armstrong – which carried potential far beyond LeMond’s high-end road niche – without putting the LeMond line on the back burner.

It’s easy to say this in hindsight but Trek should have bought LeMond out of their deal as soon as Lance won his first Tour. I worked in a Trek/LeMond dealer circa 2003 and by that time, Trek was not exerting their best efforts – although that’s an entirely subjective position that would be hard to prove in court. On the other hand, Trek has the right not to do business with people who make damaging statements about their other (more important) partners.

I’m not a lawyer but my sense is that – based solely on the merits of the lawsuit – LeMond could achieve a pyrrhic victory at best due to his own violations of the agreement. But by making Lance the focal point of the case, LeMond has put all the pressure on Trek. If the company settles, that could be interpreted as having less then total confidence in Armstrong. If they go to trial, the spectacle could be a disaster for Trek even though LeMond will most likely not prove anything about Lance.

Ultimately, I think it’s in Trek’s best interest to settle, which is unfortunate. Clearly, both Trek and LeMond could have done more to keep their partnership on the right track. But the way I see it, the most unethical act by either party was LeMond selling bikes on the sly. Furthermore, if LeMond felt so strongly that Armstrong was dirty, the principled thing to do would have been to sever the relationship with Trek. Instead, he sued to keep Trek from doing exactly that.

It goes without saying that there will be no winners in this except the lawyers. Frankly, the whole thing is a disgrace and everyone will come out looking badly.

Rapha promotional vehicle from the Tour of Britain

Postmodernism

A business theorist named Peter Drucker once wrote that an enterprise has two essential functions: marketing and innovation. Until quite recently, this philosophy dominated the segment of the bike industry that focuses on road cyclists who could be described as “moderate-to-heavy users”. However, there now seems to be a backlash against the innovation part of Drucker’s dictum as newly influential players emphasize nostalgia rather than performance. But how far will this new aesthetic carry them?

… legitimate innovation in the road cycling market is harder and harder to achieve. After a flurry of advancements a few years ago, it’s now possible to buy an inexpensive, unbranded carbon frame from Asia that’s lighter and stiffer than pretty much every frame that was ever produced prior to around 2006. Consumers know this.

VDB

I think that VDB’s death tapped into many of the same emotions as this postmodern aesthetic. In some ways, he transports us back to the transition from pro cycling’s past to its present. Had his career stayed on track, he certainly would have followed his contemporaries into aero wheels, power meters, and the wind tunnel. He might even have adapted from the naked, unrepentant doping of his era to the more secretive cheating of today.

But it was never meant to be. Even as he hung around the fringes of the sport, VDB never truly joined pro cycling’s modern era. So our image of him remains that of his early years – brash, helmetless, smashing climbs in the big ring.

photo by n0seblunt

I think the bike industry doesn’t really work very well. It’s too performance oriented, too exclusive.

We have one bike – a single speed and eight speed – and to put that into the bike industry machine, that’s a very small offering and I don’t think we’d get any visibility above the other bigger brands.

We didn’t want to make the Puma fixed gear because you feel like everybody’s gonna do that eventually… and everybody did.

9 months later…

Needless to say, I was surprised to see Puma exhibiting a fixed-gear at Interbike. Their stand was set up and run by  Biomega, the forward-thinking Danish bike designer that created Puma’s original and subsequent models. According to Biomega’s staff, Puma’s plan isn’t so much to enter the bike shop world as it is to sell bikes through boutiques and other non-IBDs of the kind that already carry Puma sneakers. Still, there they were – talking to bike dealers at the bicycle industry trade show.

My interpretation is that, despite the bike industry’s growing efforts to reach the new urban consumer, Puma sees interest in bikes increasing even more quickly. So they’ve changed their strategy from using the bike as a branding piece to trying to move a significant number of units through as many channels as they can, even if it means challenging what Antonio described as “the dominance of Trek, Giant, and Specialized.” I’m extremely curious to see their next move.

In case you missed it before, here’s my interview with Antonio.

Addendum

After some additional unpacking, I found some info that Biomega gave me about the Puma bike line. Here’s what the catalog has to say about the above fixed-gear model:

• Choice of modern, non-traditional bike colours
• Perfect for everyday use in the city
• Lightweight materials (aluminium frame)
• Designed by Biomega and inspired by the PUMA Bike II
• Available with or without a back wheel that can be reversed to switch between a single speed free wheel and fixie

TYPE
The PUMA Bike IIII mixes city bike features (dual brakes, free wheel mode, 28” wheels) and track bike features (handlebar, aggressive seating position, fixie mode) to create a new typology.

DESIGN
Smart, sturdy, and fast, the PUMA Bike IIII comes with track bike handlebars. The geometric construction holds the body in a forward, leaning position for an aggressive urban commute. In general it references a track bike, but is made out of aluminium for lightness and includes brakes for security. The bike comes with or without a back wheel that can be reversed to switch between a single speed free wheel and fixie.

PERSONAL NOTES FROM THE DESIGNER
HEAVY DUTY – I designed a chunky frame to make it adequate for daily urban grind.
FREE/FIXED GEAR SWITCH  – Be part of an urban fixie culture or be reasonable. I loved the choice this rear hub gives you. [Note: It looked a regular fixed/free flip-flop hub, not something like the SRAM Torpedo.]

More thoughts

The original Puma Bike has some really cool features, like a cable lock that also serves as the down tube. It wouldn’t be the right bike for me, but it would be for a lot of people. I liked that Puma and Biomega focused on utility and user-friendliness. But now they’re getting away from that approach and into more standard bike industry territory. Biomega makes some interesting, original bikes (more on those in a bit…) but this one didn’t stand out from crowded field of me-too fixies.

Robert Gourley of Mojave Interactive recently posted this analysis of social media performance during the Tour de France for Trek, Specialized, Cannondale, and Cervélo. He also gave this insightful interview on my buddy Rick Vosper’s blog. I have a different interpretation of the numbers, which I’ll get to in a minute. In short, Mojave found that:

… both Trek and Specialized use Social Media well. Specialized edges over Trek in some key areas, like integration and user engagement. Cervélo has great organic buzz, despite having a smaller corporate Social Media strategy.

Although Technorati paints the opposite picture over the last 30 days, I don’t dispute Mojave’s numbers. Here’s what Gourley told Vosper and I believe this is true.

We’re partnered with a bunch of different tracking tools analytics companies. But it turns out none of those tools really give you a complete picture. We’re a small group, and we have our own internal analysts, and we use them to develop a much more complete picture of what’s going on, and that’s how we put the Tour comparison together.

The problem

What the study fails to address is that Cervélo is the title sponsor of Cervélo TestTeam, whereas Trek, Specialized, and Cannondale are the bike sponsors of the Astana, Saxo Bank, and Liquigas teams. So when a blogger talks about Thor Hushovd or Carlos Sastre, Cervélo gets a mention by default. But when a blogger talks about Lance Armstrong or Alberto Contador, Astana is much more likely to be mentioned than Trek is. Same thing for Fabian Cancellara or Andy Schleck, Saxo Bank, and Specialized. Same thing for Franco Pellizotti or Vincenzo Nibali, Liquigas, and Cannondale.

To be fair, Gourley touches on this in the interview with Rick Vosper. But I think it’s a huge factor that significantly clouds Mojave’s analysis. It becomes more about the merits of Cervélo’s sponsorship strategy than it is about social media marketing. Despite the apparent social media benefits of their approach, Cervélo has stated that they can achieve their goals with the team (e.g. control of the program and rider involvement in product development) without being the title sponsor and they’re looking for a non-cycling brand to come on board

.

My point here is not to rip Mojave. They’ve produced an excellent analysis and I don’t doubt its accuracy. Instead, I mean to say that a brand’s social media performance has to be viewed in the context of its overall strategy.

Looking at the four brands in the study, I’d say that Specialized is by far the most active in social media. They’ve put significant online ad campaigns behind I Am Specialized and they’ve recently hired a full-time social media guy. Trek hasn’t been as active, although they’ve made some effort. So has Cannondale according to Gourley. Cervélo, meanwhile, hasn’t done as much socially. They haven’t used Twitter for conversation and their excellent video series at Bartape.net lacks social features.

Why aren’t these relative efforts even remotely reflected in Mojave’s popularity data? Because the numbers reflect more general brand positioning. Let’s take Specialized as a baseline and look factors in the other brands’ performance.

• Cervélo got a boost because they’re a title sponsor and therefore get more mentions (see above).
• Trek is in the same non-title sponsor boat as Specialized but sponsors the most talked-about riders, Lance Armstrong and Alberto Contador.
• Cannondale took a hit because their sponsored team, Liquigas, had a lower profile than Specialized’s Saxo Bank.

Conclusion

Social media is effective for brands. Joining the conversation in the right way with the right content can be a win for marketing, customer service, and sales. Clearly, there’s a huge opportunity, especially to reach a web-savvy consumer base like cyclists.

But there are too many variables – such as everything else that the company does – to compare one brand’s social media marketing to another’s over a short period. Metrics like those used by Mojave are extremely valuable but I think they’re much more useful when tracking single brand’s social media footprint over time. Combine that with internal conversion tracking to get the clearest picture of ROI from social media marketing.

(Photo taken by me at the Tour of California for Zipp. I wish I had time to Photoshop out the blue rope. Oh well.)