This article is part of the Brixen Bike Papers – a 41 Publishing initiative from our 2025 Think Tank in Brixen, created with the goal of building a better bike world.
A series of essays diving into the uncomfortable truths, hidden opportunities, and real changes our industry needs. Click here for the overview of all released stories.
The Brixen World Bike Papers – The Media and Marketing Problem – Too Dumb To Be Simple?
1. Everyone Agrees. Almost No One Acts.
At our 41 Think Tanks in Leonberg and later in Brixen, one thing was impossible to ignore: everyone in the room knew what was wrong. The industry’s obsession with numbers, specs and internal logic is holding cycling back. The need to shift from performance to experience, from facts to emotion, from industry thinking to rider relevance was widely acknowledged.
Brand leaders said it openly. Product managers agreed. Developers nodded. The diagnosis was clear. And yet, outside the Think Tank, very little has changed.
The same headlines dominate. The same superlatives define success. The same numbers are pushed harder than ever. If the problem is so obvious, why does the system keep running in the same direction?
Because stories create reality. And right now, the story our industry tells — in campaigns, shops and media alike — is superlative-driven, nerdy and data-heavy. It speaks fluently to insiders, but struggles to translate passion into accessibility, belonging and inspiration. We cannot expect cycling to grow if we keep repeating the same messages to the same people.
The core misunderstanding is simple: what feels natural to us as core riders is not automatically understandable to others. Culture is communication. And our future depends on how well we learn to translate what we love into something others can feel.
2. When Was the Last Time You Booked a Holiday Because of the Plane?
Imagine walking into a travel agency and they start selling you engine thrust, cruising altitude and fuel efficiency. Wing profiles, seat pitch, avionics — as if that’s why the Canary Islands ever mattered.
What you actually want is the first breath of warm Atlantic air. Salt on your skin. Black volcanic soil under your feet. Slow mornings in the sun and long evenings watching the ocean swallow the light. Now apply the same logic to cycling.
3. Superlatives Are Not Performance.
Yes, many of us are core riders. We like numbers. We care about being better, faster, more efficient. Aero savings on road bikes. Motor torque and peak power on e-bikes. Performance matters.
But without context, numbers are just abstractions — promises made in laboratories, while real riding happens elsewhere: on broken roads, in turbulent air, with tired legs, imperfect posture and real riders.
We celebrate aero gains without asking at which speeds and yaw angles they actually occur. We glorify lab results without questioning what happens outside wind tunnels, in the real world. And we obsess over peak motor power or battery size without ever asking whether this actually improves our ride — or quietly makes it worse.
If we were truly serious about performance, we would ask better questions. But context complicates the story. And complexity doesn’t fit into a headline. So we simplify. We reduce. We exaggerate. Until performance becomes a proxy for something else: attention.
4. Blinded By the LightsHypes.
This is not new. We’ve been here before. The bike industry has a short memory.
A golden Kashima coating once stood for performance. A Shimano XT drivetrain practically sold bikes on its own. 650B versus 29” was treated like a belief system, not a design choice. And every time, the industry learned the same lesson — too late.
There were good and bad 29ers. There were good and bad 650B bikes. There were great bikes and terrible bikes with Shimano XT drivetrains. There are excellent bikes and horrible bikes with fancy Kashima-coated forks. And yes, there will be good and shitty bikes with the next “game-changing” motor as well.
Symbols change. The mistake stays the same.
5. Sensationalism: Are We Too Dumb To Be Simple?
Sensationalism didn’t sneak into cycling by accident. It was invited, rewarded, optimized — and eventually normalized. Media learned that extremes generate attention. Marketing learned that attention converts better than understanding. Influencers learned that numbers travel faster than nuance, especially in ecosystems like YouTube, where algorithms reward exaggeration through headlines and thumbnails. Shops, under pressure to simplify complex products and close sales quickly, often followed the same logic. Instead of properly educating riders, many went down the easy path: selling the Shimano XT–equipped bike as a shortcut to quality — as if the drivetrain alone defined the ride. And the industry adjusted accordingly.
What we now call “simplicity” is often just reduction without responsibility: stripped context, isolated figures, rankings without meaning. It looks clear, but it isn’t. It’s convenient. Being truly simple would mean explaining complexity honestly — admitting trade-offs, talking about use cases instead of superlatives, helping people decide instead of impressing them. That kind of simplicity is hard. It requires confidence, expertise and restraint.
Sensationalism, by contrast, is easy. The numbers game escalates by design: more torque, less weight, bigger batteries. There will always be one number that beats the others — marginally, briefly and loudly.
6. The Illusion of Objectivity
“Numbers do not lie” is one of the most dangerous myths in modern communication. Every measurement is a construction — a decision about what to measure, how to measure it, and why it should matter. What we call objectivity often hides something else: the fear of ambiguity and the desire for control, dressed up as truth.
Numbers feel neutral, precise, unquestionable. Like judging a car by horsepower instead of how it actually drives. But confusing measurement with understanding doesn’t create clarity — it creates distance. Hiding behind figures in the name of objectivity is often a sign that we no longer know how to talk about our products in meaningful terms.
We know this: “Not everything that counts can be counted. Not everything that can be counted counts.” And yet, we keep counting.
This isn’t clarity. It’s distortion. Simplicity without depth doesn’t help riders make better decisions — it nudges them toward louder ones. Complexity is not the enemy. Pretending it doesn’t exist is.
7. When Stupid Simplicity Turns Toxic
We know now: numbers alone don’t solve problems. They create competition without context and progress without direction. Media simplify. Brands respond. Shops repeat. Products follow.
What everyone talks about becomes the only thing anyone talks about. Numbers feel objective, so we hide behind them. Rankings feel fair, so we stop questioning them. This is not an information ecosystem — it’s an echo chamber. We are told many true things, but not the truth, because context and the bigger picture are missing.
We’ve been here before. In the 2000s, stiffness-to-weight ratios became religion. Static, one-directional lab tests pretended to describe real-world performance — and the industry obediently followed. Frames got stiffer, numbers looked better, and riding quality suffered. Engineering departments optimized for magazine tests instead of real riders, and a generation of worse bikes was the result. Today, the same mechanism is visible again. When influencers and media rank motors by speed, brands build more powerful motors. When headlines glorify peak output, engineers chase lab values. And once again, almost no one asks whether these metrics actually matter on the trail.
What actually works has never been universal. It depends on the rider — skill level, riding style, terrain, expectations and intent. Always has. Always will. Yet we continue to sell absolutes and isolated components bolted onto a frame. This logic doesn’t just oversimplify — it’s toxic for the ride. We keep measuring one-dimensional numbers to explain multidimensional experiences, and then act surprised when the results feel hollow. What we miss: Components are just components. Numbers are just numbers. But they are not solutions.
8. Consumers Don’t Want Information. They Want Solutions.
People don’t buy products. They buy change. Improvement. Relief. A better version of their future. A better ride. More confidence. Less fatigue. More flow. What matters is not what something is, but what it does for them — how it changes their experience, their decisions, their reality.
Yet we keep drowning people in information: torque curves, stiffness values, watt hours, weight savings, comparative tables. Many core riders have learned to speak this language — not because it is always needed, but because it’s what the industry has taught them to focus on. Simplified benchmarks become shortcuts for decision-making. Buy the number, buy the promise. But cycling doesn’t work that way. Some figures matter, yes — but outsourcing progress and satisfaction to isolated parameters rarely leads to lasting joy. The next benchmark is always waiting.
Zoom out, and the gap becomes obvious. Newcomers and less core riders ask different questions. They don’t ask, “What is this?” They ask, “What will change if I choose this?” When communication answers that question, price becomes secondary. When it doesn’t, no discount is low enough. Price only becomes an objection when value is missing.
9. The Role of Journalism
Good journalism plays a decisive role in all of this. Our job is not to flatten reality into data, but to translate meaning, open understanding, and create resonance. We should be architects of awareness, not accountants of numbers. That also means holding up stronger mirrors. If we leave a press camp with nothing but high fives after a trail ride, flattering quotes, or a screenshot of our Strava stats, we’ve missed the point.
Our role is not to be nice, charming, or convenient for the industry — it is to reflect reality with responsibility, nuance, and honesty. Yes, many media outlets are struggling — often as much as brands are — but this is, at least in part, self-inflicted. Creating value means digging deeper, asking harder questions, and resisting the comfort of easy narratives.
Journalism exists to rebuild the cultural walls that keep us connected: the structures that give riding its meaning, its language, its soul. Lazy journalism hides behind statistics. Courageous journalism questions them. If we cannot explain what truly matters, we should not pretend that numbers will. Relevance is not earned by applause, but by clarity.
So we have to ask ourselves a more fundamental question: what kind of world do we want to ride in — and what kind of one are we currently creating through our silence?
10. Awareness Is Not the Problem. Action Is.
This critique did not come from the sidelines. Already at our 41 Think Tank in Leonberg in April 2025, it came from within the industry itself — from people responsible for building, selling, and shaping bikes. Different brands, different roles, same diagnosis: the obsession with numbers is holding cycling back. The voices that follow are not accusations, but admissions — and a clear call for change.
“Right now, we’re caught in a numbers game. If we put all bikes into an Excel spreadsheet, we’ll find a category where each one comes out on top — but that’s not how great bikes are chosen. We need to shift the focus: put brand, emotion, and design first — not just the numbers. Let’s talk about where and how a bike is made, what it stands for, and how it inspires. Because ultimately, it’s not just about specs — it’s about getting people, especially the next generation, excited about bikes.”
Felix Stix, Product Manager FOCUS Bikes
“We need to put the customer back in focus — and shift from performance to experience. Inclusion means breaking out of our bike industry bubble. There are so many people out there who aren’t riding yet. We need to reach them, inspire them, and get them on bikes. And we need to better educate our dealers so the customers get the bike they need.”
Hannes Genze, Head of Research and Development MERIDA & CENTURION GERMANY GMBH
“The answer is clear and simple: we need to return to real marketing — not to selling facts and figures, but to selling emotions. The kind of things that can’t be easily conveyed on paper. That’s why we need to engage more deeply.”
Roland Czuday, Product Manager eMTB at Cannondale
11. The Cost of Chasing Benchmarks. From Differentiation to Dependence.
There is another consequence of our fixation on numbers and isolated “hero” components that often goes unnoticed. By treating performance as the sum of a few headline metrics or hype products, we lose sight of the bike as a complete system — the interaction of geometry, kinematics, motor, battery, suspension, tires, and software working together in real use. The result is an unhealthy dependency on benchmarks and branded components as proxies for quality.
Bikes begin to look, feel, and get sold the same way, justified by identical arguments and comparable numbers. Instead of developing and communicating holistic solutions, brands are pushed — and often push themselves — into fitting in rather than standing out, following the same agendas instead of setting their own. Communication is not optional; it is fundamental. It defines a brand’s worldview and determines whether it connects with its audience — or vanishes in the copy-paste logic of the market.
12. The Opportunity We Keep Missing
The Opportunity We Keep Missing
We have built an industry that speaks fluently to insiders — and struggles to reach anyone else. The market is not saturated. The pond is. And beyond it lies an ocean of people who could ride, but don’t feel addressed, invited or understood.
So the real question is no longer whether cycling has a future. It does. The question is simpler — and harder: Who are we still talking to? And who are we missing because we keep talking to ourselves? Why do so many brands, campaigns and conversations still circle the same specs, the same logic, the same audience — instead of opening new narratives, new entry points and new reasons to care?
It’s time to bring clarity, nuance and culture back into the ride — into media, shop talk and brand communication alike. And more importantly, it’s time to step up our game: to educate riders, dealers and consumers well enough that decisions are driven by understanding, not by superlatives.
Those who will win are not the ones with the biggest numbers. They are the ones who can create value, connection and solutions again. Not by selling the plane. But by finally talking about the destination.
This article is part of the Brixen Bike Papers – a 41 Publishing initiative from our 2025 Think Tank in Brixen, created with the goal of building a better bike world.
A series of essays diving into the uncomfortable truths, hidden opportunities, and real changes our industry needs. Click here for the overview of all released stories.
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Words: Juansi Vivo, Robin Schmitt Photos: Diverse