It’s an old axiom in the marketing business (and life in general) that if you try to be all things to all people then you won’t really have much appeal to anyone. It’s better to bite off one segment of the market and have a really sincere conversation with them than it is to engage multiple segments and say nothing—or worse, sound insincere.
Occasionally though there’s a company or a brand who runs counter to this wisdom and manages to strike the perfect chord with multiple audiences. It’s probably not fashionable for someone in my position to admit, but whenever I run across a brand that does this I feel a slight bit of awe.
In my spare time I’m a bit of a bike geek so I'm a sucker for just about anything related to the sport. But if I had never pedaled a mile I’d still be a fan of Rapha. They have managed to present their brand in such a way that they appeal to a wide variety of segments in the cycling world—and seemingly, no audience likes to segment themselves as much as cyclists.
Since they only recently have put a few Cycling Club locations in the states, the foundation of Rapha’s success no doubt starts with their website. Not only is it so rich in content that you can spend hours watching videos, looking at photographs, reading stories and blogs without so much as looking at anything with a price tag, but the user experience when you’re doing so is interesting, simple and easy. And whether they are talking to (with) the roadies, the city commuters, the hipster-fixie set, or the travel enthusiasts, they do it in a consistent voice which is almost always accompanied by a beautiful marriage of design and photography.
No matter which audience you’re coming from you get the feeling that the folks at Rapha get you, and that's a huge deal. I’m not quite sure which audience they started with but I’m pretty sure it was the road enthusiast. Then somewhere down the line someone (who probably felt that there are not enough cyclists in general) wanted to know if they could have just as sincere of a conversation with the urban cyclist. Hats off to the mastermind curator of these conversations—or more likely the road guru, the commuter guru, and so on. My sense is the brand is fostered to such a degree that if any of those conversations felt fake then they would be abandoned.
I don’t know if the appeal to certain segments is as strong as it would be if they were only talking to that segment, but given that Rapha is having multiple conversations at the same time they deserve a lot of credit for doing it really well. Because as one of my clients said, “You have to hand it to anyone who can sell socks for $30.”