Do communities need brands?

It's the eternal conversation about the relationship between culture and commerce, and it's so evident in the running world in 2025

The conversation about where brands and the media fit into the topic of run culture came about in the spring when a mammoth number of activations, shakeouts, and other miscellaneous events popped up around the Boston and London Marathons.

There was conversation about run culture “peaking,” which I addressed here, but it led to the more meaningful question of how does running move forward sustainably?

In the second of my conversations at Runlimited in London last month, I invited a few interesting voices from the running world to talk it all through. Joining me in the discussion was:

• Ellie-May Brooks, global marketing lead of On

• Simon Freeman, publisher of Like the Wind magazine

• Ali Wilkinson, EMEA Marketing Manager, Running at New Balance

The role of brands in running culture

AW “First and foremost it’s about creating an infrastructure or ecosystem around sport that allows accessibility and inclusivity. When brands are heavily involved, you have to take a step back and think about what value are we really bringing. Are we investing for 10 years or 10 minutes?”

“People across all walks of life want to connect and resonate with a brand – it’s self-expression. I think we have a duty to provide spaces for them where they can connect with the brand, but most importantly with the sport, and almost guide someone’s journey through a sport, whether it’s their first 5k or first marathon.”

E-MB “I think a key part is the product. If you think about road racing, the product developments have led this new narrative around what is possible. The athlete storytelling as well. Breaking4 being the most recent opportunity for brands to push the performance side of run culture.”

“I think the other side of it is the narrative that you tell as a brand. Last year there was a very famous brand which [ran an ad campaign] of, ‘Win At All Costs.’ That campaign spoke to a very particular run consumer. A bit later we came out with, ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself - soft wins.’”

SF “I think that campaign spoke to a group of runners who have a distinct culture from a whole different group of runners who have their own distinct culture. There isn’t one thing that a brand can do that is going to speak to running culture globally because I don’t think there is such a thing.”

“I love that Malcolm Gladwell presentation where he talks about this guy that did masses of research into the best pasta sauce, and the conclusion that he came to was there is no best pasta sauce. There is only best pasta sauces based on different people.”

Sheer numbers of people

We have gained an estimated 50% more runners since 2020. That unfathomable figure is what we’re talking about when we say ‘running boom,’ and when 1,000,000 people entered the ballot for the London Marathon earlier this year, people started believing it.

Even though somewhere around 30% of the UK population runs regularly, only 1.5% of the population applied. Yeah, that means only 1 in 20 runners even thinks about being a marathoner. Just in case you’re considering putting marathons front and center of all your running thoughts.

AW “Marathon running is still super niche. In our world we talk about it like it’s the core running industry but to so many people, it’s incredibly off-putting and intimidating, so I think we always have to bring it back to running just being getting out of the door and exercising and clearing your head. As brands and media, we’ve got so much to do to tell the story of that runner.

Those numbers are large, and they’re still growing, but in the brands/culture conversation, it’s interesting to think about 50% more people both as a huge commercial opportunity but also as more of every subculture of running being represented during this blossoming.

SF “What’s super exciting for me is to see people who might go to Parkrun, discover running, think, ‘This is really for me,’ and then they get to express their personal identity through the choices they make: the brands they wear, the races they go and do, and find some weird, obscure race that nobody’s heard of. That is really exciting. When I started running, it was very much more homogenous. Like the Wind would be a pretty dull, thin magazine if there wasn’t this mass of cultures and everyone expressing themselves in their own way.”

That new 33% of runners contains a disproportionate number of women and minority runners. If brands aren’t centering a more diverse image of the runner, are they making the most of those commercial opportunities? Even if the stories weren’t fascinating in and of themselves, ‘Go woke or go broke,’ is a lesson many businesses are learning, after all. Funding underrepresented groups can pay dividends while elevating the experience for members of those communities who are yet to be brought into the running world.

SF “Where I see brands playing a part is as facilitators. My view is that media wouldn’t be what it is without brand support. We wouldn’t be able to reflect run culture if we didn’t have the brands there giving us a helping hand.”

Simon goes on to talk about the economics of selling a magazine for £12 that would cost four times as much without advertising. He talks about people balking at the cost and how people expect to get the magazine for free.

Community vs Commodity

I am seeing that mentality at run clubs more and more, where there is an expectation to have everything laid on for free. There’s an expectation for everything to be paid for by a brand. How, then, in the same breath can we complain that there is too much brand presence?

E-MB “More and more brands are clocking on to the potential of run communities to the point that they would create their own. A huge commercial success, no doubt, but the damage that starts to create on the authentic run culture and predominantly city run culture, was something that I watched happen. People were coming to those communities and asking, ‘Where is my Boston Marathon bib?’ or, ‘I want my t-shirt.’ You start to breed a culture that is around free stuff, which is not the culture that I knew.”

“I feel a real responsibility with the communities that I work with to do that authentically. People are still doing cool stuff. I believe it’s the brand’s responsibility to see those people, elevate those people, not try to replicate or own it.”

A big question/gripe came from Trojan from Emancipated Run Crew. He had similar, deeply-entrenched complaints about brands seemingly parachuting in and purchasing the work that run crew leaders and other volunteers had done for free, but rewarded individuals rather than the community.

The communities are the crux of run culture, after all. Commoditizing those communities is rightly seen as a callous act, but Trojan talks about how run leaders often see these brand partnerships as the ultimate goal. If those leaders are now actively using their communities to court those purse strings? What is a brand to do?

E-MB “Community leaders have that same responsibility. If a brand comes and shows you big dollar signs, think about how you’re spending that on your community, not yourself.”

SF “It’s an intractable problem because when I started running my path was to join a run club, and the annual membership fee was £35. It was a very small investment but the only reason the club worked was because there was a committee of volunteers and these people put in crazy amounts of hours. We turned up and just expected the whole thing to operate. I don’t understand how to solve it.”

“Hundreds and hundreds of people expect to turn up at run crews and have all this laid on for them for nothing. And there is a single source: brands.”

AW “As it becomes more saturated and congested we genuinely do pay to have partners because we know about operational costs and we want to reward your partnership with us. It’s a long-term two-way relationship, and I think as long as you have that as the principles of what you’re standing for and what you’re building, you take a quality not quantity approach.”

“I think brands are going to invest more in track refurbishment or youth development programs and things that have a more long term impact on the sport.”

What can we do?

In a somewhat harrowing social experiment, I put these events with a DIY ethos. I spoke to a couple of brands about a tiny bit of financial support to pay photographers, for instance, but I decided to instead make the events pay-what-you-want with a suggested £5 ticket price. Tiny. If everyone did that, we’d all get a couple of slices of pizza and beverages as well. It’s the idea of a self-sufficient commune. A community. I had faith that it would be easy and wonderful, but…

Around 200 people registered for the events at an average of £0.97. A photographer (who only put £1 in themselves) declined to work for that fee. So what’s the answer if people want to extract so much more out of something than they’re willing to put in?

The big idea running through Running Sucks is about thinking more deeply about running, and that’s a mentality that I espouse for all facets of our lives. It’s related to being more thoughtful about the things we spend our time on. It’s related to conscious consumerism, corporate social responsibility, and supporting your community with both time and money.

It all fits under the umbrella of believing that we can build the world that we want to live in.

I don’t want to believe that we’ve gone beyond the pale in terms of building sustainable communities that don’t need external support. After all, it’s always taken a lot of effort to get people to donate either time or money to anything, and yet the overwhelming narrative is that of complaints about increasingly generic options.

Running is in the best moment it’s ever been in, in my opinion. It’s more diverse in terms of who’s running, how we’re running, why we’re running, and where we’re running. We have the power to choose to be surrounded by better things, fueled by creativity and community, but the questions remain: how much do we really want that, and what are we willing to do to build that world?

Further reading

Being a more effective ally for women runners

What is running culture?

A run club leader, a journalist, and a brand rep walk into a running store...

Jonathan S. Bean

attended the evening and wrote his thoughts up on his VENGA! publication much faster than I did. And then I received a physical zine version in the post. That’s what I’m talking about. A little more thought. A little more effort.

Housekeeping

BOOK - Thanks so much to everyone who has already pre-ordered my book, This Is Running. You helped it become the #1 Hot New Release on Amazon.co.uk this weekend, and that is pretty cool at a moment when Jared Beasley’s brilliant biography of Lazarus Lake and the Barkley Marathons is released.

USA - Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Bookshop
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Thanks for reading,
Raz x