Cycle3 (aka OPEN), do not have any marketing experts. But Vroomen is wrong. Why? Because he is obsessed with the buyers of racing bikes from Cervélo and mountain bikes from OPEN. And he’s obsessed with the engineering-driven products he offers them.
Cervélo Cycles, which Vroomen sold in 2011 but for which he remains an advisor, is a Canadian manufacturer of racing bicycle frames. He focused Cervélo to help his customers win races—and they do. In the 2005 Tour de France, David Zabriskie rode the fastest time trial in the race’s history on a Cervélo P3C at an average speed of 54.676 kph (33.954 mph). The winner of the 2008 Tour de France, Carlos Sastre, did so on a Cervélo. And at the three most recent Olympics, Cervélo bikes were ridden by dozens of athletes, resulting in multiple gold, silver, and bronze medals. Besides building excellent bikes, Vroomen also excels at using the web to tell cycling enthusiasts compelling stories, to educate them, to engage them in conversation, and to entertain them. Vroomen is a terrific marketer because he uses web content in interesting ways and sells a bunch of bikes in the process.
“In marketing, if the point is for our company to get noticed, we can’t do it the same as everybody else,” Vroomen says. “A big part of that is to do something unexpected and being remarkable. For example, we were the first to blog at the Tour de France and the first to do video there.”
The Cervélo site works extremely well because it includes perfect content for visitors who are ready to buy a bike and also for people who are just browsing. The content is valuable and authentic compared to the marketing messages that appear on so many other sites. “Our goal is education,” Vroomen says. “We have a technical product, and we’re the most engineering-driven company in the industry. Most bike companies don’t employ a single engineer, and Cervélo has eight. So we want to have that engineering focus stand out with the content on the site. We don’t sell on the newest paint job. So on the site, we’re not spending our time creating fluff. Instead, we have a good set of content.”
Ryan Patch is an amateur triathlon competitor on the Vortex Racing team—just the sort of customer Cervélo wants to reach. “On the Cervélo site, I learned that Bobby Julich rides the same bike that is available to me,” Patch says. “And it’s not just that they are riding, but they are doing really well. I can see how someone won the Giro de Italia on a Cervélo. That’s mind-blowing, that I can get the same bike that the pros are riding. I can ride the same gear. Cervélo has as much street cred as you can have with shaved legs.”
Patch says that if you’re looking to buy a new bike, if you are a hard-core consumer, then there is a great deal of detailed information on the Cervélo site about the bikes’ technology, construction, and specs. “What I really like about this website is how it gives off the aura of legitimacy, being based in fact, not fluff,” he says.
Search engine marketing is important for Cervélo. Because of the keyword-rich cycling content available on the site, Vroomen says, Cervélo gets the same amount of search engine traffic as many sites for bike companies that are 10 times larger. As a result, Cervélo has grown quickly into one of the most important bike companies in the world.
In 2011, Vroomen shifted gears and now spends the majority of his time at Open Cycle, the mountain bike company he co-founded with Andy Kessler and launched in mid-2012. Now OPEN sells via over 100 stores in dozens of countries, its own office/showroom in Basel, and an online store. He took to heart what he learned at Cervélo, making every aspect of the company “open” to customers. Right from the start, OPEN focused on social engagement throughout the site, with community aspects and social networking links. Anyone can comment on anything.
The OPEN site also features a blog.4 What’s interesting is that Vroomen and Kessler had been blogging for a year as they secretly developed the technology for their new bike, but the blog posts went unpublished until launch. “We talk not only about the product but also about how we’re running the company,” Vroomen says. “So a part of that was publishing that blog after we launched, so people could see what we’d been doing the year leading up to us becoming visible.”
Vroomen is committed to having the community of enthusiasts help them, and that’s a big reason why they chose the name Open Cycle. “Every page on the site has a question and answer section at the bottom,” he says. “So it’s very easy, as soon as you’ve read something, to say, ‘Hey, I don’t quite understand this.’ We answer all of those as soon as we can, time zone permitting, but certainly within a day, usually sooner. People see that when they ask something, they actually get a response. But the crazy part is that consumers don’t expect it. So we said, ‘How about if we ask people to talk to us, and we respond?’ That’s the basic premise of OPEN.”
The company’s use of questions and answers on every page of the OPEN site, the comment feature on the OPEN blog, and social networks like Instagram (@opencycle has 40,000+ followers) serves as a terrific way to market the new company. “I don’t think of it as marketing,” Vroomen says. “It feels simply like talking to people. And networks like Facebook, Twitter, et al. have given us some interesting ways to do that. They turn companies such as Open Cycle into the global version of the village baker of yesteryear. You know your customers and they know you, so you want to treat them well. You want to give them good quality, and they tell their neighbors. That’s the opposite of what’s happening at many companies today. And, of course, the flip side is that if you don’t treat them well they’ll tell the rest of the village.”
All signs point to OPEN being on a trajectory to replicate the tremendous success of Cervélo—with the site, the blog, and social networking leading the way forward. And that’s no coincidence. As Vroomen would tell you, the ideas you’ll read about in this book work.
“This is the future for companies like us,” Vroomen says. “You can be very small and occupy a niche and still sell your products all over the world. It’s amazing, when we go into a new country, the amount of name recognition we have. The Internet gives you opportunities you never had before. And it’s not rocket science. It’s pretty easy to figure out.”
The Long Tail of Marketing
The theory of the long tail as popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name is that our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of major hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
Some of today’s most successful Internet businesses leverage the long tail to reach underserved customers and satisfy demand for products not found in traditional physical stores. Examples include Amazon, which makes available at the click of a mouse hundreds of thousands of books and other products not stocked in local chain stores; Spotify and other services that legally bring niche music not found in record stores to people who crave artists outside the mainstream; and Netflix, which exploited the long tail of demand for movie rentals beyond the blockbuster hits found at the local DVD rental shop. The business implications of the long tail are profound and illustrate that there’s much money to be made by creating and distributing at the long end of the tail. Yes, big hits are still important. But as these businesses have shown, there’s a huge market beyond the latest Batman movie, U2, Taylor Swift, and Top Gear.
So, what about marketing? While Anderson’s book focuses on product availability and selling models on the web, the concepts apply equally well to marketing. There’s no doubt that there is a long-tail market for web content created by organizations of all kinds—corporations, nonprofits, churches, schools, individuals,
