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A Tale of Two Trail Shoes

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Here’s a fascinating tale of two trail shoes. 

This fall, two brands I admire—KEEN and Tracksmith—both launched into the trail run category. 

Both campaigns feel brand-aligned, respectively:

Tracksmith’s is academic, polished, and rooted in New England. 

KEEN’s is gritty, playful, technical, a little bit gorpy and a little bit fashion. 

But brand alignment is only the first step. A strong launch campaign—particularly when stepping into a new category—also must be rooted in a deep knowledge of your audience. 

The Instagram comments prompted by each launch perfectly capture community sentiment:

The comments section is usually a safe barometer of how a collection will perform, but they don’t spell out why one wins and another is a miss. With a bit of analysis, there’s a lot we can learn from each.

Here’s why Tracksmith is a miss for me:

Style over substance:

  • The Tracksmith Overland campaign is all about romancing New England trails, laced with nature quotes from Emerson and Thoreau. Honestly, who cares? Trail running is about adventure and endurance. If you’re in a shoe for 4+ hours, you want to know it will perform. That this assurance is conspicuously missing from the Tracksmith Overland campaign hub makes me wonder if Tracksmith actually stands by the shoe’s performance. At a glance, I don’t trust it will hold up to anything more rugged than a few miles on a gravel road. (Also not convinced their hydration vest was ever wear-tested by a distance runner—IYKYK.)

Non-endemic talent:

  • Tracksmith features a marathoner and a track runner as their male models instead of seasoned trail runners. To cross over like this, you need to be legitimized by the community you’re targeting. A perfect example of that done well? Diadora’s “High Mileage Summer campaign, which centered on a pop-up Flagstaff with campfire stories by ultra legends like Jamil Coury. When you’re targeting an incredibly passionate, tight-knit community of athletes, you can’t fake it. Imagine if Tracksmith had instead used some true NE endurance talent like Cole Crosby for this campaign—the community could have pressure tested the creative direction and preserved a lot of brand equity.

Here’s where the KEEN campaign is a win for me: 

Endemic talent:

  • I see my trail run community in the campaign styling: bandanas, poles, sun hats, reflective shades, actual dirt in the shoe treads. This is very true to the type of image-aware ultra trail runner who may consider crossing over from a pair of KEEN hikers to runners. 

The right spirit:

  • Ultra running is hard, but it’s fun. Yes it’s also introspective and meditative—which Tracksmith attempted to capture. But KEEN captured the inherent playfulness you can’t avoid when running down loamy switchbacks. Their spunky tagline “Happiest Known Times” is a sharp contrast to Tracksmith’s navel gazing “Where the Miles Wander,” and it captures that feeling every trail runner is chasing. 

Product validation:

  • KEEN’s three-part YouTube campaign ticks all the boxes—it tells the product development story and shares the failures that led to a super technical product, it gives a product feature deep dive that explains how each design decision improves your run, and it shows the product in rough terrain. I actually believe they’ve tested the sh*t out of this shoe to ensure comfort and durability.

When you have a winning campaign, your fans and your sales numbers will swiftly let you know. But the good news is that you don’t have to wait for a campaign to launch before discovering if it’s a hit. I suspect Tracksmith skipped the simple step of validating their creative direction with their target audience. And maybe they forgot to develop a distinct segment of their audience persona—which made it easy to overlook the fact that trail runners are not track runners.

My takeaway from this tale is simple: know your audience, design for them and consult them.

I’d love to hear what you think. What failsafe steps do you take when launching into a new category? How could Tracksmith have made their Overland campaign a win? Why do you think KEEN’s launch was a success? Where could they make it tighter? Send me your thoughts at amanda@mondaycreative.co