Fitness App Strava Deserves A Marketing Gold Medal | Connections Ep 7 | Salesforce

The whole point of Connections is to get out of the office.

So, okay, I'm going to open the Strava app, go to record. I'm going to hit start.

Let's go for a run. Hey, I'm Sarah Franklin, and welcome to Connections, where we hear from some of the most innovative leaders in marketing. I am obsessed with running, and that has made me obsessed with an app called Strava, a social network for athletes. Every time I go for a run, I log in on Strava, where I can track all my activities, see my friends activities, and exchange workout tips, routes, and progress. So I'm thrilled today to be joined by Strava chairman and co founder Mark Gainey for an afternoon run here in the Bay Area. And you can bet I'll be logging this one on Strava. So I'm a power user, love Strava. But for those that might not know, like, what is Strava?

So simple terms, Strava, it's a global community of athletes. We've got about, gosh, we're approaching about 90 million athletes worldwide in 190 countries. And really, they're just doing two simple things. One is just deliver some really great feedback. We call it surprise and delight. Let's bring some joy. You've just worked really hard. How can we make that fun? So, just feedback around trends and how you're doing and pace and so forth. But the other thing we're doing is we're connecting you with your friends who are probably really curious about what you're up to, but also are there to support you in it. And so by having those friends who can give you kudos and comment and you can compete on leaderboards and do challenges together, we find that that combination is what keeps people active. And the mission behind Strava is very simple. If you're active, good things happen, but you need your friends to keep doing it. And so this was a simple way for us to do it. And we kind of got lucky because it turned out that a lot of other people enjoy it too.

Talk about building your first company, Kana, and tapping into that power of team.

We gotta go back to last century, 1995. And I've been working for a venture firm, and my co founder, Michael, he actually was teaching at Stanford, and we had the bug to start something. Ironically, it was called Kana Sports at the time, and it was supposed to be Strava. We thought we could build this virtual locker room on the Internet and kind of bring all of our friends together. It was something that he and I missed. We had been teammates on the rowing team at Harvard, and we really wanted to get that back. We started down our journey to create this Kana Sports, and it just turned out that the idea had merit, but we were way too early. The technology wasn't there. People weren't prepared to share workouts online. So classic entrepreneurs, we pivoted. We found an opportunity in enterprise software. The next five years were just this crazy ride. That time between 95 and the early 2000s, and you fast forward to 2008, 2009, the world had changed. It was much easier for people to actually capture a workout. So the idea of people sharing their workouts and beginning to sort of come together on a platform like Strava made a lot more sense. So we were now in our early 40s, Michael and I, and once again got the band together. And between you and me, if we'd been the only two customers, we would have been happy. We just wanted something that would inspire.

Us just to get together.

Yeah. And to keep us active.

What advice do you have for marketers in the world that are saying, like, how do I build that community?

It starts with great product. It has to have something that our members are. They're excited to use and they want to share with their friends. You know, marketing now is just sort of. It's integrated into the product itself. So we're very conscious of how do we make it easy to invite your friends? How do we make sure that, again, it's authentic? We use that word a lot inside Strava. It's one of the core values is that it's not good enough to just say, hey, invite your friends. It's like, why?

And you talk about authenticity. You started actually very focused on biking. Right. Do you think that that helped make your brand credible to your athletes?

Yeah, it's a great question. When we launched Strava, we always had a vision that we wanted to support this global community of athletes. But our go to market strategy was let's pick one sport and let's go deep. We used to call it going inch wide and a mile deep. And so we did. We picked cyclists. We used to refer to them affectionately as mammals, middle aged men and Lycra. It was a great group. It included myself. But by being very focused and intentional on that group, we forged a relationship with them. You really got to know what their needs were, and it was talking to them that things like segments were born and sort of understanding how they like to participate in the real world when they were cycling and by doing that, two things happened. One was we developed credibility in the market, but we also gained confidence. And so then it was much easier for us to think about, okay, well, now how would we think about running?

You've always been an athlete. What has sports taught you about life?

The ability to practice and then see the results. I mean, that's magic. Adversity, success and failure. I've had plenty of failed attempts at different events and, you know, not being able to finish and so forth. Apply that to all kinds of parts of my life now, and probably the biggest one has been team. Just teamwork. Nothing happens by myself. It's just. And I learned that when I was on the crew team. You have eight rowers and one coxswain. You had to be in sync. I mean, being able to do that, whether it's with my family or it's my co workers now, it does always come back to that group of people and how you can kind of synchronize together.

So that community. 90 million, you say?

Almost.

Oh, my gosh, that's incredible.

Yeah. Today we see about 2 million new athletes every month, about 190 countries.

How do you maintain that connection and that authenticity at that level of scale?

Yeah, candidly, not always. Well, I mean, I think we're just scratching the surface. Strava is a. It's a very local experience. I have friends that I follow all over the world, but my daily Strava is very much about my trails and my roads and the people that I'm probably training with. And so we've had to learn how to not just localize from a language perspective, but actually go in country. Before the pandemic hit, that's what I was doing. I was traveling to the UK or traveling to Brazil and really talking to our members and understanding the unique characteristics in these places for how athletics affects their life. I mean, a trail runner in Brazil is having a wildly different experience from somebody who's in the uk. And so for us, it's just continuing that conversation and then being very transparent around what we can and can't do.

You said that 20th century marketing was about selling, but 21st century marketing is about listening. Explain that to me.

I've stolen that from my co founder, Michael. He brought that up a couple years ago, and I think it's a really good point. So we were looking at the likes of a Patagonia and a Nike and the Oakleys and just these great iconic brands. And one of the things we saw last century was that they were very good at Sort of creating message, Nike, just do it. We absolutely understand the value of doing that. But we think what's happening in the 21st century, at least for a company like Strava, is it's really not our ability to have the right message. It's our ability to take all this information that's coming in from our athletes and listen in a way where we can create personal experience. It's going to be our ability to understand Sarah, the runner on Strava and provide you with the information that you need to go have a successful day. Much more so than just delivering that iconic brand message.

Do you think that Strava has completely reshaped fitness?

Well, I'd like to think that we have some really interesting leaders, leadership opportunities in this space, I'll put it that way. I mean, we're sitting at the hub of connected fitness right now. We're seeing all this growth around us, whether it's the likes of what Apple's doing with Apple Watch and the fitness and peloton and so forth. And the beauty is all those activities fall into strop. We've got almost three quarters of all the professional Tour riders in the Tour de France uploading every stage. And this isn't because we went out and worked with them or partnered with them, it's just what they do. Even at my personal life, very personal level, it was two years ago that through Strava, I was basically notified I had a heart problem. And so being able to sort of have that information, didn't feel it, but I could see it in the data, so I can see that impact. So to answer your question, do we think that we have a role in sort of having sort of the ability to reshape fitness and how fitness impacts the rest of society? Yeah. Pretty excited about being able to do that.

What advice do you have to brands and marketers that are looking to connect to their customers and their fans and their community and bring that joy?

When I talk about authenticity, part of why that works is that we're very intentional about who we serve and who we don't. We know who our customer is. And then being very transparent, we've made plenty of mistakes. It sounds like you've been with us long enough. You know about all kinds of different things where we'll acknowledge when feature doesn't work.

They moved the things a few times, like my training stats. It's like, where are they? I can't find them.

But you're exactly right. And we're going to make mistakes. And as long as we Own them. I think we can go forward together.

So you have this ingenious marketing approach where you're letting your eye do the marketing for you. How did that happen and what does that look like?

I wish that it was some master plan, but in many respects it had to do with, first off, as a startup, we're limited in funds, so we did not have huge marketing dollars and big budgets to go out there and create ad campaigns and so forth. If, for instance, one cyclist or runner came onto the platform, they had friends they were already training with. And so we learned pretty early that by providing the tools and frankly, the desire for the. For our members to invite their friends in, that led to great growth in.

Terms of marketing at Strava, then what works and what doesn't?

Well, we've learned how to play the long game. I would say what hasn't worked is when we try to focus too much on measurement of marketing, we fail. Michael and I are deeply committed to. It just takes a long time to build brand and you need to stop worrying about which campaigns worked and which didn't. So I think that's something that we've learned the hard way and plenty of board pressure around sort of, you know, those metrics, results metrics. But I think in general, we've learned that, no, the brand has to speak. Then there's lots of little things, like, for instance, you'll never see us in marketing use anybody other than our community members goes back to that authenticity. We're not going to hire people to do it. Same thing when it comes to professionals and so forth that are on the platform. We'll work with them, we'll partner with them on different initiatives. But they had to find us. They needed to come and really realize that, yes, drama is something that they enjoy. Once that was the case, then we could do some really great campaigns with them. So those are some of the simple things.

So what should brands and marketers keep in mind when they're trying to listen to their audience?

I was with a really great marketing consultant years ago, and we were sitting in a Starbucks and she asked me, so we were talking about Straub, and she said, well, tell me a little bit about your customer base. And it just so happened there were a group of cyclists that were sitting over in a corner having coffee after a ride. And I said, well, see that group of four people, that's our target audience right there. And her face lit up because she said, you know, oftentimes when I ask people this question, they'll say, well, anybody here in Starbucks could be the audience. But in our case, as I mentioned, inch wide mile D. By going and being very focused and intentional, we then could have an intimate conversation. And as you start to do that, you start to just p tease out. Oh, interesting. So this is how they talk. This is the language that they use. These are the features that they're going to need if they were ever to go digital. So I think listening comes down to, do you really know who your customer is and who they aren't?

How far did we go?

Reaching just over a mile. And it was deep. Yeah.

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