A few days ago, Instagram showed me a short video from an account connected to an app designed to help runners find free stuff during major race weekends. The fact that such a service exists already tells you quite a lot about where running culture is right now.
The video listed brand shakeout runs planned for UTMB week in Chamonix. It was 30+ events. I did some half-assed research and found dozens of them within minutes. Community runs, shoe tests, guided outings, and sessions with professional athletes, often several competing for the same runners at the same time.
Elsewhere, cafés are being taken over, pop-up stores… pop up, athletes are put behind microphones, whole chalets and hotels are being occupied by brands, and limited products are released specifically for this one special week.
Brands have turned Chamonix into an outdoor trade show, except nobody wants it to feel like one. So instead, they dress it up as hanging out with friends.
The Friendly Sell
Brand activation… what a phrase. It sounds like a particularly recent piece of marketing bullshit, but the term has been around for decades.
The principle is simple: traditional advertising wants you to notice a brand, while activation tries to connect that brand to an experience. Running through Chamonix in a pair of slick new shoes, meeting the elite athlete who wears them on race day and having coffee and bagels afterwards gives the brand and its product much more power than a website or a Facebook ad ever could.
This works because the experience itself can be completely genuine. You might have a super nice morning run, meet someone you like and discover a shoe that works perfectly for you. None of those things has to be fake simply because a company paid for the whole setup.
But why do brands pay for it?
Make no mistake: what might look spontaneous from the outside is a well-planned, highly structured and clinically scripted marketing event. Pro athletes, location and product are chosen. Someone decides how many people should attend and what kind of people. And then everything is documented professionally by photographers and content teams who make sure that the event reaches considerably more people than those who were actually there.
A two-hour run / event can provide material for several days of social media while every participant becomes part of the imagery that proves how culturally relevant the brand supposedly is.
The runners are customers, guests and content at the same time.
Activated to Death
Judging by Chamonix, brand activation works so well that almost every running brand on this planet has arrived at the same conclusion: do more of it.
This is where the whole thing starts eating itself.
A run with an athlete you admire can be truly memorable. A shoe test in an extraordinarily beautiful place can definitely change how you think about a product. But when dozens of brands offer some variation of the same run, the same coffee & bagel, and the same access to their products within a few days, the activations become assembly-line products.
In Chamonix (and elsewhere) this has become an arms race. Nobody wants to be absent during the biggest week in trail running, so everybody adds another event, another athlete, another limited product, another reason to register. While the individual brand may still get some nice photographs, the industry as a whole produces an enormous amount of completely interchangeable marketing.
This alone wouldn’t be so much of a problem if there wasn’t all the talk about connection and belonging.
If a runner spends Monday running with one brand, Tuesday testing another and Wednesday drinking coffee with a third, each company might briefly own a piece of the runner’s attention. But did any of them create an actual relationship? I doubt it.
The Community Business
This is where the word community enters the picture, reinforced by the language in the brand activation guidelines PDF. Suddenly, the whole thing starts to feel off. Even dishonest.
Brands talk about building communities, growing communities and serving their communities when what they are actually building is an audience around a commercial entity. That audience can be affectionate, loyal and deeply involved, yet the underlying relationship remains unmistakably clear: one side sells products and the other buys them.
The terminology matters because running brands increasingly try to sell identity alongside shoes and clothes. Knowing the athletes, attending the right events, owning the limited product and understanding the references all help signal which part of running culture someone belongs to or how deeply they are involved. Over time a commercial preference can start resembling membership, to the point where we casually talk about our brand.
“XYZ is my brand.”
I find that phrase extremely strange. The company owns the brand, not the consumer. We might have developed feelings for it, but the only things we own are products.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with those feelings. I run a running brand myself and know perfectly well that companies can have values, employ people who genuinely care about the sport and support things that would otherwise never happen. The bullshit begins when the commercial relationship is sold as something more mutual than it actually is.
A useful thought experiment is to remove everything valuable to the company. Imagine attendance declining, social posts disappearing and sales remaining completely unaffected by the project. Imagine the community continuing to meet, except that nobody mentions the brand anymore.
How long would the marketing budget survive?
Be Useful (aka Don’t Be Evil)
Brands obviously have every reason to be in Chamonix. Tens of thousands of people who love trail running have gathered in one small valley, many of them exactly the people these companies make products for. Their presence is not the problem.
The problem is arriving with nothing more interesting to contribute than another copy-paste shakeout run.
Fortunately, during my half-assed research, I also found some examples that point in a more useful direction. Vibram helps runners understand how to repair and extend the life of their shoes. SIDAS offers free foot analysis during the week. rabbit1 offers gear and race-packing advice for runners preparing for their events
All of these still market a company. The difference is that the marketing starts with something worth doing.
The Gold Rush
Trail running is growing and UTMB week concentrates an absurd amount of attention in one valley. Nobody wants to miss out on this. But success under those optimal conditions does not tell you very much. A fully booked shakeout run proves that people like guided events, hanging out with celebrity runners and free stuff. It says considerably less about whether they will remember which brand organized it once they have done five more before Friday.
And that is where this whole activation boom starts to cross a line. Running brands used to compete over products. Increasingly, they compete over the places, rituals and social experiences surrounding the sport. They are fighting for a piece of our running identity.
Selling shoes is one thing. Becoming part of how runners understand who they are and where they belong is a far bigger ambition. One we should question much more critically.
Everything Not Running
With that being said: Off to Chamonix!
On Sunday we’re heading to the trail running Mecca, ultra running’s Ground Zero, annual reunion of basically everyone who has ever owned a Salomon vest2. I’ve experienced it a few times already and still get drawn back into it, despite the growing absurdity.
Lisa and I are going with friends. The plan is extraordinarily simple: hang out, watch races, drink coffee, and run a lot ourselves. My friend Benni, whom you might remember from my Trail Alsace story, is running UTMB, so there will be some proper dot-watching and trailside yelling involved as well.
It is basically a classic runcation. I once wrote about those, then somehow stopped doing them for quite a while.
Either way, I am very ready for this one.
On Repeat
Hardcore has always been full of values, convictions and relatable ideas about how the world should work. At the same time, there was always another essential ingredient: not giving a fuck. Somewhere along the way, some bands seem to have lost that part and started taking themselves painfully seriously.
Haywire 617 clearly didn’t get that memo. Everything about this band feels gloriously unconcerned with good taste, expectations or whether anyone approves. They give absolutely no fucks about anything, and watching Interstate Love Affair makes that attitude almost tangible.
Hardcore needs more of that.
Not to be confused with Rappid. I wonder if they’re already involved in a legal dispute.
I already told my fellow running writer and Waterdown fanboi Raziq Rauf that I am very bad at networking, but if you’re in Chamonixxx and want to chat about the good ol’ days or drink coffee, hmu (that means “drop me a message”).
There are 119 documented events and probably more never listed its suffocating.
See you in the hot tub