Competitive running tries to become more inclusive sport
Branding changes target quality of people’s experiences
Taylor Little was 20 when she lined up for her first marathon. Because she has cerebral palsy, Little needed someone else’s legs and arms to help get her through it.
Peter Kline was a 60-year-old experienced distance runner looking for a new challenge when he lined up behind a large jogging stroller that day in 2012 to push Little through the 26.2 miles of the Las Vegas Marathon.
They made it across the finish line together in 5 hours 27 minutes, and Little still remembers her emotions from that day. “I felt like I could be like everyone else,” she said recently.
Little, now 25, has kept going, joined by her sister Erin, 20, who also has cerebral palsy. Since that first race in Las Vegas, Nev., their hometown, they have each done about three marathons a year.
That day also helped change Kline, who had regularly run marathons. He never returned to traditional racing, he said, and he founded Marathons With Meaning, an organization that pairs runners and people with disabilities.
Marathons With Meaning was featured in a striking holiday catalog released late last year by the apparel company Brooks Running, which is a sponsor of Kline’s group. The catalog eschewed conventional models and Olympic contenders, leading off with photographs of runners from another organization that Brooks supports: Black Girls Run!, which aims to encourage healthier lifestyles for all women, but especially African-Americans.
The theme, said Melanie Allen, Brooks’ chief marketing officer, was “giving back,” and the catalog aimed to show running as more than a solitary sport in which the quality of the experience is measured strictly by a clock.
The concept appears to be in step with a distinct trend in running, as well as an emerging one in marketing. The competitive running boom, which led to a glut of races with steep fees, has crested and started giving way to more social, and less exclusive, events like mud runs. The sport’s future may be more about connecting than competing.
For Toni Carey, 34, one of the founders of Black Girls Run!, the Brooks theme was “a breath of fresh air.”
At the same time, the advertising world in general has been taking baby steps away from the airbrushed idealism often used to sell products to women. CVS Pharmacy announced last week that it would stop altering the images associated with its beauty
products. Aerie, the lingerie line of American Eagle Outfitters, had made a similar pledge.
In 2004, Dove began a campaign called Real Beauty featuring women of various ages, races and sizes. The strategy brought Dove lasting fame, but over the years the company has also produced heavily criticized “before and after” ads that showed darkskinned women morphing into white ones. Also, critics have noted that while Dove said it was changing the standards of beauty, the campaign implicitly told women to buy Dove products in order to be beautiful.
Nevertheless, the campaign increased sales, said Americus Reed II, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He said he had seen internal data from Dove.
For a company like Brooks, Reed said, this sort of approach can be risky.
“Brand is a signal of identity,” he said, and traditional advertising for running gear plays on customers’ idealized view of themselves. A runner might know she is a novice, but when looking at a photograph of a perfectly toned athlete on a mountain road, she might imagine herself there, with a bit of effort.
Even if competitive athletes are moved by the images in the Brooks holiday catalog, they may subliminally reject the product because they don’t recognize their idealized selves in the campaign, Reed said.
Carey, a communications and marketing manager for a nonprofit, said that members of her group were not paid in cash for appearing in the catalog, but that they got to keep the clothes they wore. And they got to impart the mission of Black Girls Run! in a way they had not expected.
She and Kline have no doubt that Brooks was wise to focus on how running can build communities. “Oh my God, these brands are actually getting it,” Carey said.
Kline, an investment adviser for Merrill Lynch in Bellevue, Wash., said: “I think it’s genius. I have no financial interest in Brooks, but I hope they blow the doors off.”