What Consumers Want
While dominant, generic brands continue to focus on controlling their existing customers using a variety of strategies based on their experience and success stories, the pandemic has caused a significant shift in consumer mindset. Now, differentiation is key, even more so than scalability.
It appears that the bicycle market segmentation will move towards a brand experience promise for each individual customer. "Niche" is already too vague for current customer demands.
As large brands strive to own the channel, maintain sales above break-even levels, and control the consumer, new brands and buying experiences are emerging due to micro niche segmentation. Hyper-consumer categorization now dominates not only in manufacturing, but also in message creation and distributor portfolio building.
The final step of the decision making process, buying and customer approach is changing to become more and more focused on individual options. It is no longer enough to simply conceal logos to appear as a cooler brand.
One brand per rider will present the next marketing challenge for brand managers.