Loved this case study.
I worked in brand strategy and advertising for the first decade of my career, before moving into design and innovation, but I still work with CMOs and brand managers, so there was so much of interest in this story.
I’m also a recent convert to Brooks, having recently got back into running and been amazed at just how much more comfortable they were than any other brand I tried on.
Some thoughts:
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A powerful brand is really about coherence, consistency and customer insight. Yes, you need the right business strategy and business model, and Weber made some incredible calls and early decisions including around the product which couldn’t have gone better, but you can have these things and still not necessarily have a strong brand imho. In addition, there needs to be a core organising idea that infuses every element of the company to build a strong brand. Marketing practitioners refer to the 4Ps: price, promotion (e.g advertising), place (distribution) and product. And your case demonstrates how Weber’s focus on catering exclusively to proper runners infused all 4Ps - upending the distribution model, changing the pricing strategy, making transformative product decisions and creating great campaigns that showed how much they understood their customers and the running category more broadly. But this also trickled down into all aspects of company culture - I loved the use of “on your left” inside the company as a way of talking about momentum, for instance.
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I’ve seen many rebrand and repositioning efforts fall by the wayside because they do not filter down into every aspect of the company. They only influence marketing communications (Promotion), for instance, and don’t meaningfully shape product or distribution decisions. And they certainly don’t infuse the day to day culture of an organisation in the way Brooks has.
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This also reminded me of previous discussions of Customer Centricity by @cedric and @tomcritchlow . Weber was someone who developed a fingertip feel for what customers wanted, and over time ensured that everyone at the company did too. Phil Knight did the same at Nike, and Steve Jobs played this role at Apple.
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While it’s a 20 year story about consistency and coherence and great early decisions about segmentation, I was surprised how quickly Weber turned things around and started to build momentum: “By 2004, Brooks’s sales growth, profit margins, and returns on capital were in the top quarter of the industry”. Three years since they almost went under feels like an incredibly short amount of time to achieve this. Curious to hear what others think - is it because things were at crisis point and a new leader has licence to change everything all at once? Were the rest of the industry performing exceptionally badly at the same time?
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Lastly, I found this case interesting because the prevailing evidence in marketing over the last 15-20 years has become the idea that brand loyalty is a myth. Lots of work by Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, esp his book How Brands Grow, which is (in)famous among marketeers and brand folks, argues that brands grow through penetration not loyalty. Across many categories his academic research shows most customers are light buyers, who buy occasionally, and that loyalty levels are usually a function of market penetration. ie brands with more customers will have more repeat buyers, but most buyers will be occasional. (There are other findings of their research, so worth digging in if you’re interested). However, the research behind it was historically funded by FMCG/CPG companies like P&G, Unilever, Kellogs, Mars etc, and so that’s where the conclusions feels most robust. Over recent years the consensus has been challenged somewhat by evidence of brands that grow by selling multiple products and services to the same customers, driving up avg revenue per customer (and raising switching costs, another Power, which in turns reduces churn and increases loyalty). E.g. tech companies like Apple is one obvious poster child here. This is a slightly different definition of loyalty vs the traditional one Byron Sharp attacks. What’s interesting about Brooks is that they’ve built their whole business around selling essentially the same product multiple products per year to a relatively small and specialist customer base (the 2.6 shoes per runner stat). And I suspect whilst these runners may buy other shoes, they don’t go anywhere else for their running shoes. I think this is quite rare, and would love to hear of other brands that have done this well?
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Actually final thought - is there actual data on their levels of loyalty/repeat purchase in the book? I‘m now wondering whether they do also sell a lot of shoes to the occasional runner (like myself) not just because a) their products are great but also b) I see how well respected and loved they are by the running community and that is endorsement enough for me to get involved too. This is more evidence of a strong brand in action. Lighter/occasional customers who are not invested in the category and don’t want to spend hours researching options will look to see who the strong brands are. Who do the passionate heavy buyers in this category buy? So their positioning as a brand for serious runners not only attracts serious runners, but is also a reason why occasional / lighter buyers like myself will make a beeline for them. So I suspect they have a decent number of lighter buyers too, but only because they’ve built a brand for serious dedicated runners. If that makes sense…?