“Finger lickin’ good” – “Just Do It” – “The One and Only Cheerios” – “Never Stop Exploring” – as part of the struggle to gain our attentions, companies produce slogans to keep us humming. They retain marketers and experts to devise a simple string of words that will create brand awareness inside our brains. The hope is their powerful phrase will create enough need for us to spend all of our hard-earned money on products we need, or don’t need. Since the beginning of time, we have heard these cute, stupid, annoying, confusing, funny, moving and wordy idioms. The Mountain Biking industry is no exception.
Mountain bikers, just like all consumer groups, are faced with a multitude of advertising inputs. T.V., radio, Ipods, podcasts, print, billboards and the viral strain one ingests from friends and family are the likely tools used by companies. However, there is one major difference between the general public and our group. We are called quiver-minded. This means we need to fill our quivers – the bags once used by archers now symbolizing the necessary tools needed for a complete experience – with gear, little packaged foods, music downloads and other things to fulfill all of our needs and experiences. Because the mountain biking industry is marketing to people with this mindset, they use these special words and modifiers to represent the emotional base of fear, sexual desire or attainment of power. It is all very Freudian. Let’s look at some of the best slogans. I’ll admit shamelessly, all of the slogans I’m representing have worked on me!
DeFeet: “Technically Engineered Apparel for Athletes”
GNC: “Live Well”
Specialized: “Innovate or Die”
Price Point: “Where Price is the Point”
What slogans have remained in your head regarding mountain biking, or anything else for that matter…?
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