Yeah, but what's in it for me? Why I don't think outdoor brands should be in charge of community
Messy thoughts on how relying on brands to deliver our communities in the outdoor world is likely to end badly.
New: I am experimenting with a very unedited recording of me reading this piece to perhaps improve accessibility. I regularly send my friends 10 minute voice notes on similar subjects, so now you too can get that same experience! Set playback at at least 1.25 x if you’re used to listening to things; I’ve purposefully slowed my speech.
In April 2024 I stood in a hotel room in Warsaw, looking over the city beneath a clear, crayon blue sky and read an email from a cycling apparel brand asking me if I'd like to join as an ambassador to ‘help [them] build a community’. I sighed, deleted the email and locked my phone. I was in the Polish capital as part of a conference hosted by the United Nations and Habitat for Humanity to discuss the complex reintegration of refugees from Ukraine - something I knew very little about but was attending to learn more. I’d spent all week listening to humanitarians discuss how to support displaced people after earthquakes, floods, and conflict and how a community can make or break an individual’s resettlement.
There was an irony to receiving that email following that conference, magnified by my gazing over a city that, less than a century ago, had been razed to the ground and then painstakingly and communally rebuilt after WWII using collective memory and the literal fragments of brick dusted with the bones of their citizens.
Many months later, I was sat in a stuffy community hall meeting room discussing the painstaking process of trying to attract the minimum number of volunteers to safely put on an event, and decrying the lack of interest or uptake. Montane’s Spine event, I thought moodily, had a waiting list for volunteers, and we are barely even getting a handful. I later asked a runner friend if they would volunteer for a couple of hours. ‘What do I get out of it?’ he asked bluntly, ‘what’s the point of it?’
As different as these experiences were, both moments stirred the same realisation in me: the purpose, and definition, of community is shifting.
I realised that at some point along the way, we’ve started outsourc ing both the concept of and responsibility for community development to brands. Or, perhaps even worse than that, we’ve somehow permitted the redefinition of community to become some sort of marketing metric we can measure.
And do you know what, I don’t think brands should be in charge of that.
In the outdoors industry
Many moons ago, when I was but a mere tentatively concerned netizen, still moulding my views, I was often bombarded with requests to join brands, and regaled with the promise of extra kit and gear in exchange for ‘contributing to the community’.
I was, of course, flattered. I hopped on calls with brands, keen to discuss their community development endeavours - I was wide eyed in my naivety and the prospect of ‘building a community’ at the time was still novel and progressive. Pushing the brand with a series of questions though, the calls often ended depressingly - what they really meant by community was more likes on social media and a bigger audience to sell their stuff to. They’d happily put on a few events, they said, but they needed to understand the return on investment. ‘That’s where you come in,’ they’d say.
Every brand conversation I have had subsequently followed the same script. Every brand wants, or has, a community - in some cases that looks like shop based group runs, shop rides or brand events - and they integrate ‘outreach’ into their marketing contingent on their balance sheet. Community now means clicks, likes, sales. It means getting the right people to wear your gear. Or at least be seen in it.
A few years ago there was a spike in brand-run community challenges, such as Rapha’s Festive 500 (ride 500km over the Christmas break - I know, lol). At the time, I was on my soap box about how inaccessible these events are to (mainly) women, and spoke to a marketing friend. ‘Why are these all about bloody long distances?’ I grumbled. He shrugged, ‘the further you have to cycle, the more stuff you’ve got to carry, and the more gear we can sell you to carry it’. It all made sense.
So what’s the problem?
The problem is, or at least one of the problems is - to my mind anyway - that these ‘communities’ are steadily edging grassroots communities out. Brands have comparably large budgets and influence, able to reach broader audiences than smaller volunteer led initiatives. Brands are sexier, cooler, more exciting. You might end up in their social media promo, you could get free socks if you join their event; wearing their gear is a visible pledge of allegiance to a specific cause for minimal effort. Small, local organisations that rely on the generosity of time from residents have struggled comparatively to compete.
It all becomes transactional. We all have competing demands for our time and attention now, and we should be forgiven for living in a society that requires so much from us. But in a world where you don’t have the headspace for messy social interactions, isn’t it convenient how easily community can be bought and sold, can be clicked and received through the letterbox? You are part of a community if you continue to buy and continue to engage in content; you are a consumer first, an active participant second. Brands can facilitate that, and social media lubricates your pathway into it - share your political perspectives, favourite music and carefully curate every facet of your personality and the people you choose to engage with. Tribalism can now be purchased.
Please don’t get me wrong though, people can and do genuinely gain something valuable from these groups, and there are some brands that are endeavouring to do good with that. For some people, this might be the only accessible way to gain the social connectedness we are all intimately craving. I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing, nor am I suggesting that these should be eliminated entirely - but crucially they should be part of a healthy and varied fabric of groups and events with broader societal objectives than just ‘sell more shit’.
Brand run communities are a bit like planting mint into your garden; it looks cool, smells nice and it seems quite versatile, until you look away for five minutes and suddenly it’s overrun all your beds, is already strangling out any other plant that even considers putting down roots and you’ve just realised you really can’t think of anything else to use it for but mint tea. Brands should be part of the garden, not the whole bloody thing.
And while we are on deceptively deep roots, I’m concerned about what that reliance on a brand ends up doing for people who want to enter your sport, or your group. Take Rapha for example (apologies to Rapha for being picked on so frequently, but it is rather easy to do so), who recently announced their latest ambassadorship composed entirely of men, and three only women (two of whom weren’t able to attend the photo shoot).
My question to you asks what you think that does to a ‘community’? If the brand runs both the community side and the commercial side, how are you supposed to see yourself reflected?
If brands in the cycling world control the ‘vibe’ of cycling, manufacture clothing for a specific type of person to wear, and also create the parameters of the community, who has a real choice to join? Do you feel welcomed as a woman when you cannot find gear to fit you and the promotional material all feature lithe men? Or are you once more reminded that this is not the place for you?
What’s worse is that as smaller organisations are squeezed out and competition is reduced, brands homogenise. They no longer need to work as hard to compete, nor do they need to take any risks with their branding. They have a broader market share, and so this ‘face’ of the sport normalises.
On social media, I and others complained viscerally about this choice. But upon reflection I realised my concerns missed the point - because I was still expecting brands to uphold the complexity or ‘truth’ of community I experienced daily. But the ‘truth’ of this community is not as aspirational, nor as marketable, as a white man.
Capitalism eventually eats itself
Capitalism, by very definition, is designed to extract wealth out of the economy. In case you’ve never taken a business class, a business’ sole objective - its raison d'être- is to make money for its shareholders. Nothing more, nothing less. Businesses spruce things up, add fancy missions and fun values with quirky titles, but all of them are arbitrary in the face of their bottom line. It is the reason shareholders didn’t utter a peep when Elon Musk did his disgusting salute, but piped up in the sudden wake of a halved share price: if eating dogs and cats suddenly became fashionable in the UK, you can bet businesses would have them on our plate by Monday, no questions asked. Cycling, running, swimming and rock climbing brands are ultimately no different.
When a business can no longer compete and it can no longer meet shareholder expectations, it collapses, and takes with it everything it has suckered up, leaving nothing behind. We cannot willingly hand the keys of community over to corporations, no matter how shiny or cutesy they look. They must operate within a woven fabric of opportunities and options.
After the Tik Tok ban, I saw the hairline cracks in people beginning to realise that you cannot build communities on land you do not own, especially when that land is subject to shifting sand.
Community, when it is real and genuine, is highly resilient and is based wholly on reciprocity, which often means doing things you might not want to do to help others out. It isn’t tangible, but reliant on messy, complex and nuanced networks that tie a vast swathe of people together through shared knowledge and support. These people may be much older or younger than you, they might be richer or poorer and you might have pockets or groups that bind to you through different threads of interest, experience and locality. It’s messy and difficult and inherently unmarketable.
But community is the thing that keeps us stitched together, and I’m not sure we should trust that to anyone whose goal is to sell us socks.
Do you?
To caveat this entire piece - I am aware that there are a multiplicity of nuanced perspectives to this argument but to include all of them would take all day and likely never arrive at a solid point. So please, as my substack suggests, take these half formed thoughts and feel free to muddy them further with your own.
Oh my god 1000% this. I could not agree more. For me it's a matter of motivations and incentives; brands don't want to foster community for community's sake, they just want to sell more widgets. It's rotten top to bottom.
Something that's stuck in my mind came from a member of our local mountaineering club, which Hannah and I joined recently. One of the older members said to me, 'What people want from communities is different these days. Decades ago they asked themselves what they could contribute. Now it's all about what they can get out of it.'
As you say, capitalism-mediated community is transactional and that fundamentally poisons the well.
Excellent Immy - Fundamentally we’re all both products and to whom products are sold. Any company talking about building communities (whilst some may be laudable) are only really looking at their profits. Any contact from anyone marketing their product has to be considered in this light.