High Altitude Marketeering

Bicycling magazine does a pretty good job of catching my attention. Daily (or nearly daily) email newsletters tease content on the website and in newsstand editions. For the most part, they are well targeted and well presented, leaning heavily on reviews and training tips to generate click-throughs to their site—exactly what one would hope for from a magazine publisher. (Brand marketers take note: real content generates real interest. Promotional messages, P.R. drivel and the umpteenth athlete profile generate yawns.)

But what really caught my attention this week was the header that ran above a review of 2010 bikes. In the banner above the reviews, a navigational area lists the bike categories under which the various reviews are classified. There are twenty-six of them. Twenty-six categories of bicycle, eleven flavors of mountain bikes alone.

This sort of slice-and-dice segmentation is rife in both the bike and outdoor industries. A single line of outerwear may be broken into a dozen categories: climbing shells, mountaineering shells, backcountry shells, soft shells, wind shells, ski jackets, snowboards jackets and on and on. REI, not satisfied with the half-dozen traditional tent classifications even came up with a new category last fall, All-Season-Lightweight. “What’s that?,” you say. It’s the space “between backpacking and mountaineering tents.” I’m not sure you could squeeze a bivy sack into that space, let alone a line of tents.

To make matters worse, the classification system can change from season to season. Flip back through a few years of Patagonia catalogs and you’ll see an ever-evolving series of collection names bracketing the same assortment of products. A jacket in the “Alpine” collection one season might appear in “Mountaineering” the next. Skip ahead a few seasons and both these categories are gone, having melded into “Alpine Climbing.”

The crazy categorizing happens when manufacturers try to group products into collections they imagine will help dealers understand their offering. Often, given the lead role of developers in the outdoor industry in determining what products to bring to market, it’s not until the time comes to create sales collateral that someone starts thinking about how to present the offering as a whole to retailers.

Once the line lands in front of the dealer, the buyer must do some complicated translating to decide how to allocate open-to-buy dollars, mapping his or her classification system to that of the supplier. In the days before the web, the consumer was at the mercy of the dealer’s classification system since, no matter how the supplier organized things, it was up to the dealer to merchandise them. With the rise of direct sales though, consumers are often faced with multiple classification systems for the same product class, one on the manufacturer’s website, one on the retail floor of their local shop and probably a few more across a variety on online retailers.

So, what’s the harm in a little confusion? Ultimately, a consumer will find a jacket they like and buy it, whether it’s called an “alpine” or “mountaineering” shell. After all, they’re just going to wear it skiing anyway. Maybe. But there are a few consequences to a system in which manufacturers and retailers slice and dice products into ever-smaller and frequently changing categories.

1. It confuses consumers, positioning some products as more specialized than they should be and, especially when sport-specific categories are involved, blind entire segments of retail customers to your products.

2. It distracts both manufacturers and dealers from a real problem, and one that has plagued the industry since at least the mid-1990s: overly specialized product positioning. This is a problem bigger than the scope of this article. But for now, suffice it to say that outdoor specialty has gone specialization crazy, developing and classifying products according to what I would call sub-sports, niche segments of a broader sport, the freeride segment of mountain biking, the bouldering segment of climbing and the adventure travel segment of sportswear to name a few.

Manufacturers have gone after these spaces for a few reasons. Some have merit such as differentiation, attempts to land new distribution channels or an attempt to address a perceived unmet consumer need. Some are more questionable and amount to little more than trying to make sense of SKU-bloat by breaking a group of ill-conceived styles into a new category.

But whatever the reasons, the trend towards specialization has changed the specialty outdoor landscape, creating more collections that are meaningful to fewer consumers. This is a dangerous path, one that ends, ultimately, in a balkanized retail floor, where the average outdoor consumer bounces from one fixture to the next as they’re presented categories too specific for their needs. And pretty soon, finding a rain shell will be almost as off-putting as trying to buy a bike.