Chinese Flying Pigeon
by Richard Ballantine
Some years ago I took part in a London Cycling Campaign forum about cycling. The subject of helmet-wearing came up, and I can still remember the intense expression on one man's face as he said, "I don't want to wear a helmet. I just want to ride a bike. The whole thing should be simple; get on and go. That's the idea of a bike."
I sympathize. Riding in traffic can be an enjoyable experience, but calls for dealing with a range of hazards and problems, and using and carrying what seems like a ton of extra equipment. No question that the best times on a bike are typically far away from the conundrums of everyday riding, when you can relax: just you and a bike on a winding road through fine countryside, or treading an alpine single track, or going for broke on a track or closed-loop circuit.
The ideal of getting away from it all out into sunshine, elysian fields, and a ring of happy, smiling faces is a familiar image in cycle advertising campaigns. When manufacturers extol their bikes, riding is somehow always easy: there are no heavy locks to carry, no punctures to mend, no aggressive motorists to fend off, no trains that refuse to accept bikes, and no municipalities that prohibit parking bikes on the street. Another recurring , traditional theme is victory: ride the bike that champion so-and-so uses, that won the Tour, the Grundig Cup, or whatever.
Mountain bikes unite the themes of the great outdoors and sport competition. And by dint of their enormous success, mountain bikes have lifted cycle advertising up out of the specialist cycle press into a range of outdoor activity, environment, sports, and general health magazines, and also onto television. The trend is less apparent in the UK, which is a relatively small market with limited funds for advertising, and thoroughly evident in countries with large annual sales such as Germany and the US.
The move into mainstream markets, spread over several years, has produced a big upgrade in the quality of cycle advertising. If in the past you were going to get outdoors or win by riding brand so-and-so, then according to the new order of slick, well-tuned, glossy ads, using the right bikes and equipment will enable you to explore past the back of beyond, shoot up Mt. Everest, be the fittest, sexiest thing in town, unleash your psyche, and succeed at everything. A lot of it is pure, unadulterated hype, but promoting cycling is never a bad thing.
The neglected area in marketing, of course, is utility cycling. Its growth potential is huge, and now that the government and a range of organizations are seeking incentives for cycling and raising the level of bike usage in the UK, it is time to upgrade the image of everyday cycling and bring it into the mainstream, using all the hype, polish, glamour, and spin that modern marketing and advertising can provide.
Baywatch commuting! How about a patently sex appeal-based campaign, claiming that cyclists get all the best sexual partners, and have a better time in the sack? If they can do it for ice cream, then why not for bikes? And we need some more appropriate bike names, such as Lancer and Golden Flower. (Personally, I've always liked the Chinese Flying Pigeon and Phoenix. The Chinese also do a great Flying Pig wheel spoke.)
As any regular commuter can tell you, utility riding can be a fine sport. Traffic is an environment rich in challenges to intelligence, technique, and strength, and opportunities for fun. And by gum, in the new world of dynamite bikes made expressly to be your friend in the cut-and-thrust of traffic, then when you ride a Mad Grizzly, you are going to hammer everything else into dust. Other riders will be left gasping, and cars - why you'll ride right over them. Perhaps crack a windscreen or two. On a Divine Wind, the technique and image changes: you are lean and sinewy, honed to utter mastery of time and space as you effortlessly weave through traffic while in your wake, clumsy cars collide into each other and smash to bits.
Some prospective ride-to-work bikes are fantastic. The sleek, flowing lines of a monocoque-frame bicycle such as Mike Burrow's Windcheetah might appear suitable only for an Olympic track or world record attempt. Yet with all that space for graphics and design, the monocoque frame is perfect for taking utility bikes way upmarket. As in skiing, we can have new models annually. Advertising campaigns will have unlimited scope for focusing on the hidden engineering triumphs that each year, make the new models better, faster, and more versatile than ever before. And since blindfolded, we might not detect the difference between the current stars and last year's has-beens, each new crop will have distinctive, stunning colours and graphics. Yellow stripes one year, red spots the next - rampant consumerism! But it works for skiing, and it can, and will, work for bikes.
It is fine and entirely correct to extol the virtues of bikes in terms of benefits to the environment, health, economy, and efficiency. But to seriously promote cycling and attain goals such as a level of 60 per cent utility use on the budding new 6,500-mile national cycle network, we need to use the kind of sophisticated marketing techniques that are truly effective in reaching and motivating people. That these are likely to involve elements of artificial consumerism and what might politely be called bending the truth is an inevitable part of shifting cycling into the mainstream. In the face of sex and techno-hype, keep your sense of humour -- as said before, promoting cycling is never a bad thing.
© Richard Ballantine
Cycling
& Mountain Biking Today, March 1996
originally entitled 'Altered Images'