Trek Women Who Ride

[Kano]

Karen-
Don't forget the program is billed as "Women Who Ride- Five women just like you".
If they want to play it like that they should give us a little diversity.

They're nothing like me. They're nothing like Andrea and Velogirl who race. They're nothing like Slowbutsteady who would like to lose some weight, and they're nothing like rij17, a latina (a large part of our population in many income levels).

i think when this all plays out it might come under the heading of "it seemed like a good idea at the time".

The truth of the matter is that nobody is just like anybody else.

These five women have each faced their own life challenges and have chosen bike riding as a way to get through the day. We here on TE are a multitude of women who have each faced our life challenges and have chosen bike riding as a way to get through the day.

Without looking very far beyond the photo on the front page, I found that one races single track. Two do triathalons. One rides a hybrid. One's a mom who rides her road bike to recharge her mommy batteries. There's diversity in their riding styles. If we look a little farther, we'll certainly also find diversity in their reasons for choosing riding.

The point in my original post is that we weren't looking very deeply at these women as we complained about a lack of "diversity." I'm saddened that we are judging this book by its cover.


For what it's worth, my guess is that the "strategy" for this campaign is to sell riding a bike to "Jane Average." It's similar to Martha Stewart recently signing with SVP to promote sewing as a hobby. People who are avid, top of the line sewing machine owners appear to be in quite a tizzy about this, but they're not the target demographic.

Just like avid sewers don't need to be "sold on sewing," people who race or do superlong distance riding like some of our members don't need the sales pitch.

It takes a lot of care to choose a group of women to be "women just like you" who won't intimidate "Jane Average," and keep her on the sofa!

Yes, SO FAR we're only seeing stuff on the Trek web site, but the campaign is really just getting started. Let's see what's to come before we call it a flop, eh?

Karen in Boise

[sgtiger]

As someone who is a member of one of the aforementioned minorities, I would be more offended to find out that they had overlooked an inspirational story to try and include a token person just so people felt better about having "diversity."

Maybe it's naive of me, but I'd like to believe that the women chosen spoke out to them. I'm sure it is a difficult decision to choose just five people when they probably received thousands of stories from women who felt they had something worthy to share. They chose individuals who were willing to share their touching stories in the hopes that we, also individuals, would find a common thread.

Do we really need to be exactly the same whatever, to identify with one another. Can we not identify with the plight of a girl left to raise her siblings in Africa because her parents were taken by the AIDS epidemic. Or maybe a Muslim man trying to live his life in this country without being looked at as the enemy. Or a mom of a soldier dealing with PTSD. And I'm sure almost everyone is familiar with Anne Frank. I have very little in common with these people, but yet, their lives have touched me.

Some of the responses to this thread leave me wondering if people have actually bothered to read these women's blogs. There are complaints that these Trek women are not like me because XYZ. But if you read the blogs, you'd know that there is a woman who has started to race. A woman who couldn't drop $$$ on a bike; she had to save for six months while riding a borrowed bike. A mom who is juggling her home life with training for a Tri. A woman who had bad knees who went from walking a block to biking 30+ miles. And maybe the women who lost weight are not so heavy now (Geez, they both lost at least a person each! ) but they definitely are not a size two either (not that there's anything wrong with that). And hey, who knows what these women's natural hair colors are. I know that my current color is not the color I was born with.

So, it seams to me that some of the responses are based on these women's appearances. Isn't part of "diversity" not judging others by what they look like?

These are WOMEN WHO RIDE BIKES! Isn't that what we're here for?

[end rant]

[uforgot]

Karen and sgtiger. Thank you for your posts. I am in complete agreement, but I couldn't have put it as beautifully as you two did!

[SheFly]

It's simple - we are all cyclists. Women, men, black, white, latina, recreational, racers, MTB, roadies - doesn't matter - cyclists one and all.

This is where DH would say S.T.F.U.A.R* (his phrase, but it seemed kind of appropriate).

SheFly

*Shut the F up and Ride

[VeloVT]

Ok, I'm totally white, and you can say what you want about that, but I disagree with the views expressed most recently for the following reasons...

Advertising is different than journalism. Yes, of course, I can empathize deeply with the plights of people very different from me. But the group of people we select to be in an advertising campaign can be seen to answer one of several rhetorical questions:
1. who deserves a piece of the pie/a share of the American dream/etc
2. who do we as a society view as being the group we aspire to be like

Advertising has the power to reinforce or to change these attitudes.

Go through 20 years of Tiffany ads and I bet you'll be able to count on 0 hands the number of minorities you see -- because it's an "aspirational" brand and the aspirational myth has to do with WASPY privilege.

I think that perpetuating this kind of message through advertising is BAD.

{climbs down from soapbox}

And I have not read any of the blogs yet. And I should, because I'm sure there IS value in them. But, from my perspective, that's irrelevant to the diversity discussion.

{REALLY climbs down from soapbox}

[crazycanuck]

I like what shefly just said

C

[VeloVT]

And one more thing... I think people are getting mad at the suggestion of "diversity for diversity's sake" because it's bringing up for them the affirmative action debate -- and I am NOT going to say anything about my views on that here -- but I do think it's a mistake to view diversity in advertising as being similar to affirmative action in academia or the workplace.

Whichever side of the affirmative action debate you sympathize with, it can be agreed that there are fairness and equal treatment concerns (on both sides) that have a real impact on peoples' lives, as well as a whole host of arguments you may agree with or not about what actually is beneficial or harmful to various groups.

Advertising, though, doesn't change anyone's opportunity -- it just reflects our attitudes and perhaps plays a role in shaping them. That's not to trivialize it too much though, since attitudes play a powerful role in society...

[teigyr]

I haven't read the blogs either and I am sure they are inspirational. I am also sure everyone who rides has a story behind it. Some stories will reach more people emotionally (things like overcoming adversity or illness) than others.

I know very little about advertising and marketing campaigns. I do know that I just got through a quarter of Advertising and Marketing in school. It was amazing just how much thought goes into it and what brings a larger return on the advertising investment. The studies that are done go way beyond typical demographics; there are even considerations such as "does this group tend to buy American" and "does this person value sense of community".

I would guess that Trek is looking at who can identify with these women and whether or not this "identifying" will sell bikes. It sounds callous but Trek could donate a lot of bikes to an orphanage and we'd say "awwww...that's so nice of them" but would we buy a Trek because of it? Maybe but a lot of people don't make their purchases due to conscience. If we see someone who lost weight or improved their life, we think that could be us and we will think of Trek in that regard.

I'd also say though that TE has more savvy people than the average and we DO look at things beyond the obvious.

It's kind of sad. I look at my company that does a lot of good things. People don't care about good things, they only care about price and how what they get will affect them. That's why companies advertise the way they do.

'course this is just me with my jaded outlook and one quarter of Advertising and Marketing

[Geonz]

There's also a very, very blurry line between journalism or literature and advertising. WHen the "advertising" is a year-long blog, it's going to be more like the former.

[slmdunc]

There's also a very, very blurry line between journalism or literature and advertising. WHen the "advertising" is a year-long blog, it's going to be more like the former.

Really? Do you truly believe that the Trek campaign will become a form of journalism? Because it is in blog form for a given length of time?

My personal line between literature, journalism and advertising is not at all blurry... maybe that's just me.

[sgtiger]

I think we're having two entirely different discussions here. Some of us are focusing on the featured women themselves and some of us are focusing on Trek's marketing decisions. Both arguments have their validity.

It's true that nothing happens on accident in advertising. I don't doubt at all that Trek spent $$$ to hire a marketing firm to maximize their profits. And, yeah, they decided to capture their share of a growing market segment. Maybe there's even some resentment about being looked at as a marketing sector instead of as a person or a cyclist or what have you. I could be wrong on that part, but I can understand it because I have on occasion thought to myself looking at an ad, "Hmm... what are they trying to say here? Are they only featuring this person [insert demographic here] in the hopes of getting my money?"

However, these are real women. (At least, I hope they're not fabricated! Like that's never happened. ) Their experiences are real, although they probably signed a contract to portray Trek in a positive light in order to be considered. (Take a look at the fine print of any contest rules.) They are struggling with some of the things that we're struggling with and have shared on this forum. Such as finding time to ride around a demanding job, family, training for a Tri, overcoming challeges such as disease and trying to be more fit. I feel that if we only focus on why these women were chosen as opposed to the women themselves then we invalidate who these women are.

I could also point out that this forum is a form of advertisement for Team Estrogen. I'm sure it cost money in the way of hardware, hosting software and staffing [Thank-you Jeff!] to keep these boards operational. They probably get back their costs many times over in the forms of sales garnered from forum participants. And they have used information gleaned from this forum to determine what products to carry. Of course, they've never hidden that fact. Susan O, a buyer for TE and a forum participant herself, has from time to time, posted that they'll be carrying such and such product because of the buzz created by our posts.

How many us ,participating on this forum, have not clicked on the above link to browse the products that TE carries? Or directed someone looking for a product to take a look at TE first? Or bought an item from TE?

[Zen]

If Trek wants to make this work as advertising I don't see how it could possibly work as it is. We don't read the blogs because we already know women like this.
What might work would be a lead-in advertisement. One page, a studio shot of a woman and her bike. A short paragraph about the woman written to target the audience for a particular type of magazine. Then something along the lines of "read about other women who ride at Trek.com" Advertising and outreach.
In my utopia, it would be nice to have a diversified outreach program. many of the comments here reflect a lack of diversity in some cycling communities and I'd like to see something done to change that. Trek's business is to sell bikes yes, but maybe they would find a wider market and sell more bikes? I don't know.

Imagine.