This article is part of the Brixen Bike Papers – a 41 Publishing initiative from our 2025 Think Tank in Brixen with the goal of building a better bike world. A series of industry analysis and essays diving deep into the uncomfortable truths, hidden opportunities, and real changes our industry needs. Click here for the overview of all released stories.
Table of Contents
1. The Recipe Without the Meal
Marketing used to build desire and differentiation.
Now it builds dependency. And sameness.
Every major brand’s campaign reads like a component catalogue:
Bosch CX.
Avinox (ex DJI).
Shimano XT.
SRAM RED.
FOX Podium.
Or like a spec sheet:
110 Nm
1,5 Watts less drag.
800 Wh
19,8 kg
By the time you finish reading, it feels less like a story and much more like a shopping list or a performance sheet. Somewhere along the way, the product itself – the soul, the experience, the brand – simply disappeared.
This is not to say brands don’t create full campaigns — they do.
But in a world where the easiest message to communicate is components, ingredient-first thinking inevitably becomes the dominant narrative, overshadowing identity, culture, and meaning.
We sell the recipe, not the meal.
And the worst part is that we have been doing this for so long it feels normal. It has become a sign of how lazy we have become as an industry. Leaving the comfort zone is apparently harder than staying stuck in a loop that everyone knows is broken.
Brands tend to blame the dealers. But dealers didn’t invent ingredient marketing — they are downstream of it. And ingredient messaging now dominates to the point where brand identity becomes secondary.
2. When Ingredients Replace Identity
And the story gets worse once you look at how this ingredient obsession reshaped value itself. Let’s be clear: components matter – suspension quality, brakes, wheels, all of it. No one is denying the engineering, the performance gains, or the geek joy that comes with high-end parts.
But here is the uncomfortable truth the industry keeps avoiding: When components do all the heavy lifting in your value story, your brand stops being the hero.
If the reason a bike is €5,000 more expensive is simply because the spec list changed from GX to XX Transmission, from Rhythm to Factory, or from alloy wheels to carbon, then the brand has unintentionally positioned itself as a delivery platform for third-party engineering. That’s exactly how brands slip into the ingredient trap: the narrative, the aspiration, the identity – everything gets outsourced to SRAM, FOX, Bosch, or whoever shows up on the downtube call-outs.
And the same pattern is repeating itself with Avinox.
If your only reason to sell is being the first with Avinox, it may boost you for a year. But what happens when an entire armada of Avinox bikes enters the market? How does your story change? Where does your value come from when the ingredient you built your identity on becomes a commodity?
Components create performance value, not brand value. Performance value is repeatable, measurable, and available to everyone. Brand value is not.
A FOX Factory fork performs the same whether it’s mounted to a €3,500 bike or a €15,000 bike – so if riders don’t feel a difference in the frame, geometry, engineering, design, service ecosystem, or ownership experience, the premium collapses.
This is the real problem:
If the bike’s soul doesn’t scale with the spec sheet, the price premium becomes a liability, not an asset.
The smartest brands in other industries already understand this:
- Cars don’t sell because they use Brembo brakes.
- Cameras don’t sell because they use Sony sensors.
- Smartphones don’t sell because they use Qualcomm chips.
These ingredients help – but they don’t define the brand.
The bike world still hasn’t made that leap.
Components deliver performance.
Brands must deliver meaning.
And when meaning disappears, no amount of Kashima or XX Transmission – or the latest Avinox release – can fill the void. Except you fight the price game.
When every brand tells the same component story, sameness becomes the end result – which brings us straight to the next problem.
3. The Clone Factory
The reality is: The average bike ad today is indistinguishable from the next. Change the logo, change the color, and no one would notice.
Could you walk into a bike shop and instantly tell one brand apart from another when they are lined up side by side?
There are some strong exceptions but the majority of the brands have become very similar. Even brands like Santa Cruz have gone down a way in which they ditched their iconic VPP look to make more space for bigger motors – like a Bosch – on their eMTBs. Without decals now you could mistake it for a Transition or something else…
And here is the irony: we talk about freedom, adventure, personality, community. Yet our marketing feels as pre-packaged and risk-averse as an insurance brochure. Same gravel roads. Same mountain passes. Sa Calobra has been abused so many times by so many brands that it should start charging royalties. Same golden light. Same perfectly staged, emotionless riders in landscapes that could have been pulled from Shutterstock. And then we dare to call it authentic storytelling. Brands may add more diverse faces to their campaigns, but the language stays the same — insider-coded, performance-obsessed, and anything but inviting for new riders. Real inclusion isn’t about who appears in the photos — it’s about who the story speaks to.
4. Lost in the Bubble – The Illusion of Progress
The hardest part of being in a bubble is that everything inside still feels right. What looks progressive or innovative from the inside often lands flat outside. We applaud each other for micro-improvements and incremental ideas, mistaking internal validation for external relevance.
And because everyone around us thinks the same way, nothing challenges us.
We keep using the same narratives, the same performance framing, the same insider language – and then wonder why the rest of the world doesn’t care. If everyone agrees with you, you’re not breaking new ground. You’re orbiting in circles.
Meanwhile, new players – from lifestyle brands to EV startups like ALSO – are rewriting the rules of desire. They speak to people, not insiders. They sell identity, values, belonging – not torque numbers. And predictable as ever, the usual suspects mock them for it.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth:
They at least have a story.
Their language resonates with the 99% who aren’t hardcore riders.
Ours resonates only with the tribe already converted.
And bubbles don’t just distort ideas – they distort who we design for.
5. When Insiders Become Gatekeepers
This is where the industry’s own structure becomes its biggest barrier. Many decision-makers in this industry are riders first and executives second. Often former or almost-pro riders. They obsess over aspects that simply do not matter to 90 percent of the average customers. Bikes are still sold almost exclusively through the lens of performance. Ride like a pro. Train like a pro. At 300 watts this bike will save you 20 seconds an hour. At 150 watts? Well…
The problem isn’t that performance doesn’t matter.
The problem is that it’s not the universal entry point.
The megatrends shaping our world – health, fitness, adventure, commuting, exploration – barely appear in our storytelling. We forget why the gravel boom exists: because it brought cycling back to the essence, not because it added another performance metric.
And the media is not innocent either. Every single dropbar media camp has that moment when someone puts the hammer down. Suddenly no one is testing bikes. Everyone is racing. And the whole content becomes a self-referential bubble designed for the same small group of insiders.
This is not strategy. This is self-consumption. And it is slowly killing our ability to connect with the rest of the world.
6. Price ≠ Value
We used to inspire people to dream.
Now we train them to wait for discounts.
The price war didn’t just kill margins. It killed the vibe, the value, the magic of products.
Black Friday became our Christmas. Christmas is a whole week now.
And when that wasn’t enough, we invented Spring Is Coming, Summer Is Here, Winter is around the corner – a never-ending clearance carnival.
How do you build aspiration when your loudest message is:
“Please buy something – anything – before the next shipment lands.”
The deeper problem: brands have forgotten how to create value beyond specs and shiny components. Instead of communicating meaning and adding substance through service, customization, community, events, trips, inspiration – anything that helps riders ride better, enjoy more, or experience something genuinely transformative – the conversation has shrunk to newton meters, weight and price. And the media headlines amplify exactly that.
This is not a customer journey. It is a cycle of reactive marketing and transactional behavior. And the worst part: it is a system we designed ourselves.
7. The Psychological Fallout
The psychological effect on consumers is predictable – and damaging:
- they delay purchases because they expect a better deal
- they anchor their perception of value to discounts rather than product quality
- premium positioning erodes as price volatility signals insecurity
- loyalty weakens as the brand narrative collapses into a numerical race
Media dynamics intensify the feedback loop: spec-driven headlines deliver easy clicks, reinforcing the belief that technical ingredients – not brand values – drive demand. And like every self-fulfilling prophecy, it becomes reality. But diagnosing the problem is only half the work – the real challenge is building a way out.
8. The Real Gap – What Needs to Change
This isn’t about adding another marketing layer. It’s about building a real ecosystem – a Bike OS – that connects products, services, experiences, and communities into something riders can actually belong to. It means abandoning shortcuts and committing to the long game: creating strategies that bring new people into cycling instead of chasing whatever the algorithm rewards on a Tuesday morning. It’s about fighting the good fight: putting more people on bikes, not more bikes in warehouses.
It means building communities and culture, not just campaigns. People – except the hardcore geeks – don’t fall in love with numbers. They fall in love with stories, shared moments, and the feeling of being part of something bigger than themselves. And if they do fall in love with numbers, it’s only because we’ve spent years telling them that this is what they should care about.
And perhaps the path forward is simpler than it seems. What if brands started selling experiences alongside bikes? A supported gravel trip, a proper bike fit, a training plan, nutritional guidance, a mechanics workshop, or a skills course included with every mountain bike.
PAS Normal built a global cycling club – why couldn’t bike brands do the same? It doesn’t require expensive clubhouses in the most exclusive city centers. It could start with low-key community leaders, annual brand-specific festivals like the legendary Yeti Tribe Gathering, or even a digitally organized community for S-Works owners who finally have a place to connect, ride together, and meet like-minded riders who love the same brand. Something you want to be a part of.
Riders are craving authentic, unique experiences. They’ve just put down their hard-earned money for their dream bike – now they want to squeeze everything out of it, progress faster, and have a fucking great ride.
Instead, selling has collapsed into its dumbest form: discounts. But what about upselling in the best sense of the word? The bike is the baseline. Helping riders get more out of it – through performance and experience – is the truly addictive upgrade. Done right, you don’t create customers. You create loyal fans and ambassadors.
The best shops already understand this. They don’t just sell bikes; they sell fitting sessions, coaching, nutrition advice, skills lessons, and trips. They sell belonging. Car brands like Porsche figured this out years ago: buying the product is only the beginning. Their ice-driving programs in Lapland, gourmet road tours, and coached weekends bridge the gap between aspiration and action – turning ownership into participation.
Meanwhile, our industry still celebrates that a bike comes with a new shiny third-party component. We chase a 5% performance gain while ignoring the truth that most riders don’t unlock even 50% of their bike’s potential. That’s the real gap – and making an even better product won’t close it. What we need is an ecosystem and a culture that help riders progress, ride more, and enjoy more.
If this remains only about ingredients, then we’ve already lost. Or to put it in other words: The next decade won’t be won by performance gains, but by emotional gains – including culture, community and a new ecosystem that helps riders ride more and better.
9. The Future We Choose
What if we brought back joy, character, and personality – without abandoning the geeky curiosity that makes our industry tick? What if we redesigned this industry around the rider experience rather than the component hierarchy? What if we finally put the experience first, not the ingredients, and created a visual language that speaks to core riders and newcomers with the same authenticity?
Cycling is full of paradoxes, and it’s time we tackle them head-on. Too often, we know what we should do in theory, yet fail to act in reality. We convince ourselves we’re already doing it while repeating the same patterns. We’ve spent years calling geekiness passion and preaching inclusivity while designing a world only a few can enter. We say we want to onboard more women and welcome new target groups, yet keep communicating in the same hyper-technical narratives that push them away.
The next chapter of this industry won’t be written by algorithms or anodized bolts. It will be written by people who care – people willing to trade vanity metrics for genuine connection. At 41 Publishing, we’re not just thinking about change. We’re building it.
In 2026, we’re launching visionary editorial projects that will show what’s possible – and inspire anyone bold enough to rethink this industry. Bikes are great and have the power to make this world a better place. If you want to move the bike world and its community forward – with clarity, courage, and conviction – let’s talk. It’s time to step up our game.
Overview – The Brixen Bike Papers
This article is part of the Brixen Bike Papers – a 41 Publishing initiative from our 2025 Think Tank in Brixen with the goal of building a better bike world. A series of industry analysis and essays diving deep into the uncomfortable truths, hidden opportunities, and real changes our industry needs. Click here for the overview of all released stories.
You want more than just to read along?
Got questions, ideas, or honest feedback about the Think Tank or the Brixen Bike Papers?
Then write to Robin at robin@41publishing.com
We might not be able to reply to everyone — but we’ll read every message carefully.
We’re looking forward to your thoughts!
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Words: Juansi Vivo, Robin Schmitt Photos: Peter Walker