Running Scared

Play­ing the Fear Card

Mike Gol­fred­son, CEO of Road­Run­ner Sports, has lost it. He’s been caught run­ning his mouth off in pub­lic. In a clas­sic knee-jerk fash­ion, Mike makes a fee­ble attempt to scare cus­tomers away from the grow­ing bare­foot run­ning movement.

Try­ing to play to people’s fears in an effort to stop them from being informed will surely fail. Espe­cially when research from none other than Har­vard is being pub­lished. Try­ing to com­bat infor­ma­tion with fear doesn’t work for long (one need only look at some pre­vi­ous US admin­is­tra­tions to see that). Indeed, the only effec­tive way to go up against infor­ma­tion is with cred­i­ble and con­vinc­ing counter-information.

See Mike’s email for your­self below.

It’s Just Plain Bad for Business

As many of you are aware, I am a firm believer that run­ning bare­foot makes a ton of sense and that we can all ben­e­fit from doing at least some bare­foot run­ning. How­ever, I only need to put my busi­ness cap on to see plenty of rea­sons why Mike’s newslet­ter is a big mis­take. It breaks some car­di­nal rules of cus­tomer engage­ment and inter­ac­tion. Mike should have held his tongue (and his head of mar­ket­ing should be fired and a new PR agency hired – one with plenty of expe­ri­ence clean­ing up after reck­less CEOs).

Here are some of the rules Mike broke by send­ing such an email out to cus­tomers along with expla­na­tions for why it’s bad for his business:

1.  Let your emo­tions guide your state­ments, not be your state­ments. The whole newslet­ter reeks of per­sonal emo­tions. Using such strong lan­guage as bare­foot run­ning is a “major injury wait­ing to hap­pen,” and bold type with mul­ti­ple excla­ma­tion points is over the top emo­tion­ally.  Tak­ing a per­sonal tone with cus­tomers is a good move if you have some­thing pos­i­tive to say. For exam­ple, shar­ing a per­sonal run over the week­end and how it reminded you of why you love run­ning can offer moti­va­tion. How­ever, in dis­cred­it­ing an activ­ity that has many peo­ple enthu­si­as­tic from a per­sonal stance can come across like you are using the com­pany plat­form to lash out.

2.  Back up your state­ments with ver­i­fied facts. Mike obvi­ously knows that bare­foot run­ning has been in the press a lot lately. He there­fore is aware that many of his cus­tomers could have read some of these arti­cles. Though Mike only ref­er­ences read­ing the head­lines, he’s surely read or been told how many of these arti­cles actu­ally men­tion pos­si­ble ben­e­fits of run­ning bare­foot. That’s prob­a­bly why he felt the need to send out this email. So, why doesn’t he pro­vide some sort of research to back his state­ments up, know­ing very well that there is research sup­port­ing the oppo­site of what he’s say­ing? Not pro­vid­ing sup­port will result in a loss of cred­i­bil­ity as an informed part­ner in people’s run­ning endeavors.

3.  Treat your cus­tomers as intel­li­gent indi­vid­u­als. Busi­nesses just never seem to learn that talk­ing down to peo­ple only back­fires. “Don’t blindly fol­low the lat­est trends” infers that with­out his help peo­ple would do just that. How can that pos­si­bly have a good effect? What must Mike think of his cus­tomers if he thinks “pea-sized rocks” will leave them side­lined for weeks? He makes it sound like he thinks his cus­tomers are all frail invalids who will suf­fer a mas­sive injury from step­ping on “pea size rocks.” Give your cus­tomers more respect than that.

4.  Pro­vide value in every inter­ac­tion. It’s quite sim­ple: don’t inter­rupt peo­ple unless you can offer them a solu­tion to a real need of theirs. Pro­vid­ing a dis­count, an added ser­vice, or new and help­ful infor­ma­tion often meets this cri­te­ria. In this email, though, Mike offers noth­ing new. A call to shop for new shoes at the end of the email, after say­ing run­ning with no shoes is bad, bad, bad, is not only void of value, it’s a final reminder to the reader (just in case they didn’t make the con­nec­tion already that bare­foot run­ning is very bad for your busi­ness) that this email is all about sell­ing more shoes. So much for the open­ing state­ment about car­ing for people’s well­be­ing. It sounds like money comes first for Mike.

5.  Never, ever, look des­per­ate. Per­haps one of the biggest mis­takes Mike made in send­ing this email out is that it makes him look like his back is against the wall, and like a scared ani­mal, the claws come out. The say­ing, “’Em are fight­ing words,” comes to mind. As it will for RoadRunner’s cus­tomers. Tak­ing a defen­sive stance smells of des­per­a­tion. And cus­tomers don’t like doing busi­ness with des­per­ate com­pa­nies. They want peo­ple they can trust will be around over the long haul. Lead­ers of prod­uct and dia­logue. Com­pa­nies set­ting the stan­dards, not try­ing to tear new stan­dards down.

Some Run­ning Retail­ers Embrace Bare­foot Running

“The whole bare­foot run­ning thing,” as Mike puts it in his email, isn’t inher­ently a bad thing for retail­ers of run­ning gear. Zom­bieRun­ner, a store in Palo Alto, CA, focused on the trail and ultra run­ning mar­kets has actu­ally embraced bare­foot run­ning. After read­ing the book Born to Run, co-owners Don Lun­dell and Gillian Robin­son, hosted sev­eral bare­foot run­ning clin­ics where the author of Born to Run, Chris McDougall, along with one of the bare­foot run­ners men­tioned in the book, Bare­foot Ted, taught peo­ple how to tran­si­tion back into run­ning with­out shoes. Par­tic­i­pants weren’t allowed to wear shoes, not even the very min­i­mal Vibram Five Fingers.

When asked why a retailer, whose shoe sales make up a good per­cent­age of their over­all rev­enue would actu­ally pro­mote bare­foot run­ning, Gillian matter-of-factly responded that it was good for their runners.

Therein lies the dif­fer­ence between com­pa­nies like Road­Run­ner Sports who lash out against bare­foot run­ning and those who not only accept it but embrace it. Don and Gillian are focused on spread­ing the joy of run­ning that they expe­ri­ence. They sell only prod­ucts they would run in and firmly believe are the best for run­ners. Road­Run­ner Sports, I’m afraid, val­ues the bot­tom line more than run­ning. It prob­a­bly wasn’t the case when Road­Run­ner Sports started, but as they’ve grown they’ve for­got­ten run­ning and what’s best for the sport.

As to why exactly why Mike wrote the email, your guess is as good as mine. It prob­a­bly came down to money. He’s prob­a­bly pissed that he turned down what has become the hottest shoe on the mar­ket, the Vibram Five Fin­gers. Or his world­view is based on the belief that man is not as smart as machine. What­ever the case may be, Mike should think twice about his next move.

When you’re next in the mar­ket for run­ning gear or infor­ma­tion, think about the peo­ple behind the com­pany. Are they in it for the love of the sport? Do they sell any­thing they wouldn’t buy them­selves? Is what’s best for you dri­ving their busi­ness decisions?

Full-Transparency: I receive no perks from  any retailer nor am I cur­rently part of any affil­i­ate pro­gram. I was a pre­vi­ous cus­tomer of Road­Run­ner and am now a cus­tomer of Zom­bieRun­ner among other retail­ers of run­ning gear.