Brandwave Founder, Daniel Macaulay recently gave a keynote talk about brand positioning at Eurobike tradeshow in Friedrichshafen. Eurobike is the world’s largest tradeshow in the bike industry and a key fixture in the broader sports industry trade show calendar. In this blog, Daniel tells us what it was like to speak at this iconic event.
If you want to see a sports industry in its prime, go to Eurobike. Even though some of the larger bike brands such as Specialized and Giant have pulled out of this show in recent years, it continues to grow and really set the benchmark both in terms of numbers of exhibitors and retailer attendance. After my talk, I was approached by people from Singapore, Chile, all over Europe and it really hit home just how international this show and this market is.
This year, I was asked to speak about brand positioning. My talk was titled ‘Better Bike Brands – How to leverage your brand positioning to enhance all elements of your brand’. The bike industry is generally recognised as being quite saturated and fairly undifferentiated in terms of brand positioning with most marketing communications focusing on the latest and greatest USP as opposed to what a brand stands for. Take away the logo on most of the stands and there’s very little to separate them.
Watch the trailer video for Dan’s talk here:
This state of affairs has developed mostly because ‘it’s what the leading brands have always done’. In spite of this, there is a lot of research that indicates that even with technical products, consumers buy for 80% for emotional reasons and 20% for rational reasons.
Watch a clip of Dan’s talk at Eurobike here:
In my talk, I introduced my theory of ‘Brand Transcendence’ – done properly, brand positioning should define everything that a company is and everything that a company does both internally and externally. This means that brand positioning should directly affect internal departments such as recruitment, sales teams, new product development and resourcing. Externally it should also define advertising, PR, CSR and who the most appropriate brand ambassadors are.
As the bike market continues to grow and become more crowded, the brands that will rise to the top are the ones that clearly define what their brand stands for on an emotional level and lets that define all elements of their company moving forward.
This is a topic that I feel passionate about so it was an honour to give this talk to a sports industry that I have such respect for. At Brandwave, one of our key motivators is working with great sports brands to encourage people to try new sports or become more passionate about the sports they love. Year on year, the Global cycling community is growing. Cycling encourages you to get fitter, biking is a brilliant reason to get outdoors and this industry is fully behind this exponential growth. Just think about how many people cycle commute these days, or how often you’ll see a team of road bikers out at the weekend. It’s exciting to be part of it.
