Subcultural Fit Check
(or: What can brands learn from a “shitposting” trail running meme account?)
By now the rising popularity of running and run clubs has been well documented and analysed to pieces, so I’m sure I don’t need to make anyone aware of it as a (still growing) trend. But as a long-time long-distance runner myself, something that’s been particularly interesting to watch is the emergence of challenger specialty running brands that are taking over market share and loyalty from the likes of Nike, Adidas, and New Balance. The variety available these days is becoming overwhelming. Besides more choice, one of the things that’s been most exciting is how these brands are offering unique, single-minded viewpoints on what running can mean for people, and they’re developing real dedicated communities around those visions. Rather than a monolithic culture of sport, there’s a broadening out of what running culture is about culturally (and how it intersects with fashion). But at the same time it’s clear that the fight for a share of ‘running culture’ has also illustrated the need for brands to have a genuine understanding of the culture they’re looking to be a part of or reimagine – and that every culture has its nuances and subcultures that need to be understood, too. One of the things the rise of running brands illustrates well is that missing what’s really going on in a subculture – what really matters to people about it, why they do it, how they do it, and what they want brands to be offering them (or not) – is something that you can’t ignore, or your attempt to be a part of it will fall flat (or be mercilessly mocked, as we’ll see.)
So there’s running, and running intersecting with street style, and we’ve seen plenty of that the past couple of years. But what’s happening in running now is that brands have figured out that running is trending, and once they’ve gotten a foothold in road and track running, there’s an opportunity that’s been spotted in trail running. It seems simple, right? Interest in trail running is growing (anecdotally I can see it in my strava feed and in the numbers of people signing up to trail races, but just a quick look at google search trends also shows it’s been going up in the past couple of years.) And if you can own running as a brand, you can move into trail running, right?
Well, that’s where it seems this story of cultural misalignment starts – with a brand whose expansion strategy, I imagine, went something like that. There are many brands in this position right now, but I’m going to single out Tracksmith, simply because their launch received a particularly brutal critique I spotted on Instagram.
If you’re not familiar, Tracksmith is a running brand that’s shot to success in recent years, with retail stores in Boston, New York, and London. Their gear (and run clubs) are wildly popular, and a kind of status symbol for many urban runners. So I want to start with giving full credit to them for building a really powerful brand and one that’s probably inspired quite a few people to take up the sport. Part of their success is, of course, the brand identity and experience they’ve built and committed to over the years. It’s a brand built on a sense of nostalgia for old East Coast [elite] collegiate life and more specifically being on the Track & Field team. It’s unapologetically preppy but a bit self-aware (like a college-style tshirt that reads ‘amateur’). Buying into the brand is a chance to find the camaraderie of a university team (again or for the first time), to feel a sense of accomplishment and achievement that’s also tinged with a bit of old-money-nonchalance. You might say it’s the J.Crew of running. It’s working for them in the world of road and track running.
A screenshot from Tracksmith’s website - reliving dorm life
Tracksmith’s nostalgia works because it’s authentic to some of the heritage of the sport of track and field. And the culture of road running – even long distance running – is in many ways intertwined with track and field. So far, so good, it all makes sense as a brand narrative and experience. But now we get to their newest line – an expansion into trail running, or what they call “Overland” (one might say, ‘is that not “cross country”?’ before we even get into the discussion about trail running. But I digress.) And when it comes to trail running, Tracksmith is providing an example of where a great brand identity can run into a cultural problem, especially when expanding into an adjacent subculture or category with a culture built up around it.
This is where the Instagram posts come in. If, like me, your algorithm is often flooded with ultra trail running content (and why would it not be?) you may have seen plenty of Discourse around the Tracksmith trail running launch, or even more specifically, this unflinching critique from a self-described shitposting* account:
The longer you scroll the carousel, the more uncompromising it gets. But, to be honest, the account is onto something, even if not entirely diplomatic in expression. The issue is that everything I described above about Tracksmith’s great track and field/road running brand has little to nothing to do with the sport of trail running. And that’s the crux of the problem.
What this expansion strategy failed to understand is that just because track, road running, and trail running all involve running, or moving your own body with your own power on your feet over a specific distance, they’re fundamentally different sports. They’ve come from different motivations, they’re performed in very different contexts, with very different strategies, and have vastly different subcultures built up around them.
To understand the issue at the heart of it, we need to understand the subcultural nuance, so I’ll try to summarise:
Long distance road running is to some extent a natural extension of track and field, which is why Tracksmith’s nostalgic branding works there. Road running is, generally speaking, a sport of control and precision. You learn to control your pace and keep it consistent, to control your body to move with precision, repetitively. You run on a controlled surface, which means you can create increasingly technical footwear and gear to control energy return and how your body interacts with the ground. The beauty is that in the process your mind becomes completely free, but to perform you need to control and master as much of yourself and the environment as you can. Achievement in road running is almost intellectual, as if you can math your way through it.
Trail running, on the other hand, is more closely related to mountaineering. It’s born out of a desire to be outdoors, to move through rough landscapes at pace, and a key element of the sport is being able to manage yourself while you acknowledge how little control you have over your surroundings. It’s a sport where not finishing the race is also an achievement, where being able to ‘puke and rally’ is a key skill, and where your performance depends on knowing how to change your technique, how your body moves, depending on the grade of the trail, if it’s snowing or raining or dry and dusty. It’s a bit of a free-for all, even while athletes are pushing themselves to find strategies to do it faster and further. The sport generally has a very different attitude, one that’s generally much more “about the journey” and the way it feels to be pushed not internally but also externally. It also requires a different kind of gear to do it (and, often it seems, a different haircut, if you look around at the start of a race…).
It’s enough of a ‘thing’ that if you’re into running, you’ll get continually served memes and videos making jokes about (and reinforcing) the divide:
I’m not saying we should be slaves to subcultural gatekeeping by any means, but the fact of the matter is subcultural norms matter to the people who participate. They’re how you define a sense of community and showcase the values you share, in this case what matters about the sport, how success is defined, and what you aim to get out of it as a group. Brands who want to take part in a subculture (i.e. make money off its popularity) need to understand what members of the group feel, care about, and need to participate. Brands are what people often use to signal their membership in the subculture – ‘I know the best product to do XYX’, ‘I’ve really done the research,’ ‘I know what the real needs are here,’ – so brands are to some extent co-creating the subculture. But they can only do that when they have a right to be there in the first place, when they’ve proved themselves and the subculture buys in. And, as @yaboyscottjurek made very clear, Tracksmith hasn’t earned that right – and ultimately comes across as the rich kids trying to take the soul out of the sport by not attempting to understand.
All brands can take a lesson from this, though. It’s not just a niche issue about knowing the ins and outs of running subcultures and how they define themselves against one another. It’s about the fact that any brand needs to know not only their immediate category, but also where the real adjacencies lie, and where their brand identity feels relevant enough to stretch into new product categories.
Ultimately there’s two key problems here that Tracksmith seemed to either not realise, or willfully ignore, and it boils down to something quite simple:
1. They don’t seem to actually know anything about the culture of trail running, or what trail running’s requirements are – ultimately making it look like they’re capitalising on a sport without giving anything back to it.
2. Even if they’ve hired amazing people with deep trail product expertise, it’s a hard push for people to believe it. They don’t have permission to play in the space, because their existing brand equity is built on something at odds with the new space they want to play in.
Sure, while the fashion hype around trail running continues, some people who are dedicated Tracksmith enthusiasts might buy it because they also want to buy into the hype of trail. But if Tracksmith continues, they might ultimately dilute their brand in an attempt to fit in somewhere else. It’s mixed messages of image, and it risks everything becoming confused and inauthentic. And the reality is that trail running is a trend because of the appeal of its subculture, so people buying into it are more likely to buy from brands that make them feel like a real part of it already. (An aside: there are road running brands that can authentically move into trail, but those are brands whose equity is built on other things relevant to the space, like technical innovation.)
I think it remains to be seen how the line actually performs commercially (and culturally), but this comment seems to sum it up so far:
That shows the reality of the issue for brands pretty clearly: jumping on a bandwagon isn’t always the right strategy. Just because it’s a trend doesn’t mean you should do it, even if it seems like something your brand could feasibly do. And if you want to capitalise on a subculture, you need to actively participate in it too. Brands need culture to survive, but (to be blunt) being a culture parasite isn’t sustainable, and you’ll be called out for it pretty quickly.
In summary, there are a few things that are important to remember when considering what trends and cultural spaces are right for brands – and how to approach them if you want to get involved:
1. If you’re going to try and jump on the bandwagon of a “new” cultural phenomenon, you’d better make sure you know what it’s about, and what the real subculture is around it. What do people who participate really care about, and what do they want brands to be offering them? What are the values? What does success look like for people, and how can you support them in that?
2. What about your existing equity fits in that space? Leverage that to find your unique way in. But be honest with yourself too: if you don’t have permission to play, don’t waste your energy (or money). Find something else that’s genuinely right for you and expand there instead.
3. And it’s also worth saying: Yes, entering a new space with your own unique POV and an ‘outsider’ status can be successfully disruptive, but only if you’ve identified a genuine appetite for the disruption.
*’Shitposting’ as defined by Wikipedia: “In Internet culture, shitposting or trashposting is the act of using an online forum or social media page to post content that is of "aggressively, ironically, and trollishly poor quality".” In this case, badly photoshopped memes that lovingly mock the culture of trail running from an insider perspective – forcing people to laugh at themselves, but also opening up space to critique the commercialisation of the sport and the direction of discourse around it.
