Trek Finds a New Holiday Marketing Tradition With Fundraising Effort

This past holiday season, Trek tried out a new approach to its holiday marketing strategy, one that might become an annual tradition for the brand. Since 2005, the bike maker has partnered with bicycle distribution nonprofit World Bicycle Relief to bring Buffalo Bicycles to disadvantaged people in countries such as Colombia, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The bikes, which are easy to ride and maintain, allow people to travel long distances or transport materials they would otherwise have to carry by hand. Initially, Trek set a fundraising goal of $1 million within six weeks and matched donations up to $500,000 to help reach that goal. Ultimately, the campaign brought in $1.8 million, which will lead to the production of 11,000 bikes. "Once we surpassed that, we thought to ourselves, 'Well, we've already got this space booked, this is going well. Let's not turn off the campaign. Let's just see how much more we can go,'" said Eric Bjorling, director of brand marketing and public relations at Trek. Since its 2005 inception following the Indian Ocean tsunami, World Bicycle Relief has distributed more than 500,000 bikes across 21 countries. According to its site, it has helped decrease student absenteeism by 28%, increased patient visits by health care workers by 88% and helped farmers make 25% more dairy deliveries. "Trek and Trek retailers have been important partners since the founding of our organization back in 2005, playing a key role in the product development process that resulted in the Buffalo Bicycle," World Bicycle Relief CEO Dave Neiswander said in a statement. How Brands Are Finally Addressing the Lack of Inclusion in Outdoor Activities Bike of the Year Each year, cycling media companies feature Bikes of the Year awards, which are typically a "highly expensive, very highly engineered" model, according to Bjorling. This year, Trek's Bike of the Year was the Buffalo Bike. "We used essentially that lens to talk about the importance of these bikes and what they mean to the people who receive them," Bjorling said. "We felt like we should just use all of that equity and all that space to talk about the Buffalo Bike." To give it an additional boost, Trek also promoted the campaign across social media, in its own retail stores and at participating retailers that sold Trek bikes. And since it was around the holiday season, when more people are already buying bikes, the fundraiser got more attention. Trek was also able to take advantage of Giving Tuesday for the initiative. In particular, direct-to-consumer emails and social media drove most of the engagement with the campaign, with impressions of World Bike Relief content reaching 1.6 million between November and December, and donations averaging $171.51. "This is the first global matching campaign that we've ever embarked on, and it's the first one that we've probably ever thrown this much of our brand equity at," Bjorling said. "One of the biggest things that we realize is that our impact as a company was much more significant donating this time and that effort to this organization than it was talking about what we might have [done for] a Christmas sale or Black Friday." Schwinn and Good Co. Bike Club Challenge Outdated Ideas of What a Cyclist Looks Like