Part III - Your Passion Is A Liability To Them
But They Will Pilfer Your Authenticity Because They Have None Themselves
How can a periodical called Bicycle Retailer And Industry News (BRAIN), make so many attempts to understand the entity it reports on, but never actually figure us out? This week, longtime contributor and marketer Rick Vosper, suddenly begins to think about authenticity in the cycling industry. Let me take you on a journey in which Outside Magazine comes to acquire BRAIN, and thus one of the last vestiges of authenticity in the bicycle industry fully succumbs to, and in fact becomes, the very thing that devoured it.
As a youth in the 1990’s, I loved active outdoor activities and grew up exploring the trails around my home in the East Bay Area on foot and atop my mountain bike, so I subscribed to Outside magazine (among many others) for a time. More recently, I picked up a copy of that periodical at an airport, and came across a two-page article by outdoorist Laird Hamilton. Only, it was not an authentic article, but rather, a marketing advertisement designed and disguised as an article.
Brands can neither be authentic, nor inauthentic. Only individuals can be authentic.
By the mid-1990’s the bicycle industry had an identity crisis. There were too many authentic personalities among the various shops, machinists, bike companies, and even the racing scene. You see, passion was getting in the way of profit. Zeal for riding and getting others on a bicycle was getting in the way of business. This was an awakening for many great shop owners, who had attended the school of passion, rather than the school of business. More than a few of them took this seriously, and added to their excitement for cycling, a genuine effort and education to grow their business in order to align with their personal mission to equip, train, model, and build community around bicycle riding. But it was too late, as the corporate plan to push passionate riders out of the industry of their own making was already underway in earnest.
Don’t believe me? Look at nearly any Trek bicycle from that era. You will find a “made in the USA” sticker (usually accompanied by a sticker that the shop who built and tuned the bicycle added to the seattube). Bicycle shops, called specialty retailers by the industry aggregators, once also featured stickers on their front windows that represented the proud partnerships they were happily committed to (buy-in is what I remember them calling it), but now the brands whose stickers emblazoned shop doors sell their wares direct-to-consumers, or have opened up their own “branded” stores. Both tactics designed to compete directly with and undermine the very “independent dealers” who once developed local markets, stocked, and actively sold their products. And that is what cyclists are, in the eyes of many of these companies heads, widget purchasers who they need to sell more product to. Another of the fistfuls of examples I can give, is to look at who currently owns Outside magazine? Or even more to my point, who owns Santa Cruz Bicycles, or even Cannondale? Storied USA companies who were piloted by “way too passionate to make it” personalities.
“We don’t want you anymore, we’ve changed the locks and reprogrammed the alarm keypad, but we will gladly take your authenticity, oh and your last paycheck is in the mail, so don’t bother coming back in.”
It amazes me, no actually, it astounds me, that industry insiders, CEO’s, and marketing departments are peering into historical data and trend analysis’ crystal balls to try and “understand the consumer market”. They went all the way down to picking off some of us to become influencers. Do you know what an influencer is? Someone who peddles authenticity for a corporate board of executives. Someone who knows how to fake authenticity really, really well, in order to trick others into consuming global industrial products at scale. But now that the scheme is no longer working in mass, and economic forces are constraining individuals expendable incomes, corporations are bringing their contrived authenticity campaigns back in-house.
Don’t believe me? Look up the corporations called Revelyst, Vista Outdoor, Amer Sports. Look at the job positions these corporations have designed over the last year. I know, because I have pursued and interviewed for those soulless jobs for that length of time. For that matter, look up the holding company called PON, or the venture capital financiers who keep injecting money into dying outdoor brands based on new CEO’s with executive growth charts and promises to turn the ship of unprofitability around next quarter. Outside Inc. owns BRAIN, with which venture capital moneys did the Goliath purchase it, and to what end?
“Drink your Ovaltine? It’s a crummy commercial?!
Do not mistake market share or monopoly for brand authenticity. Any organization (especially one calling itself Authenticity.co) who indiscriminately surveys buying habit opinions from “consumers”, and scores the likes of Vans, Nike, or I shudder to even say, Apple, as being top authentic companies, just goes to show what marketers have turned this globalized world into. I mean, there was an entire Netflix series called “Mad Men” for fucks sake. And the men who were mad, were neither authentic, nor trustworthy.
The bicycle industry was hacked years ago, by profiteers, speculators, and imitative corporate greed machines. It then used every lever of force possible, even social stigma, to remove the passionate individuals who built the very foundations of this endeavor they call the bicycle industry. Their most hated obstacle, the independent bicycle shop. Our passion was a liability to them. Our zeal threatened their bottom line. They have no understanding of our authenticity. They have no eyes with which to see, no ears with which to hear. They actively hate your authenticity… but now they are coming like thieves to take it from you, repackage it as their own, and then sell it back to you at a hefty margin.
There Rick Vosper, this is the article you should have written. I fixed it for you.
