Well, it’s been a long time coming, but the confluence of issues (environmental, resilience, community, health and traffic congestion) in so many U.S. cities has finally gotten to us. Whole new business audiences are starting to notice the bike option, and opportunity, and are now scrambling to be aligned.
The thing is, you need to have been building some trust and community engagement around this for a while, in order to “sell” events or partnerships in the bike-aligned world.
If you’d seen it coming (I, for one, have been yelling at you from Twitter about this for years, right?), you’d have loved up eBikes and eCargobikes and found a way to consistently support your local bike shop or offer true win-win packages of sponsorship for community events or efforts to increase bike sales.
Whether you are a coffee shop, grocery store or hardware store, if you’d been aware, you’d have seen deliveries starting to happen by eCargobike across the globe. You’d also have been sponsoring your local bike advocacy organization to help “educate” local cities and their leaders on why infrastructure is so important. Your brand would be a shining, trusted star in a community of positive, hopeful people.
It’s a tough thing to quickly generate or to jump into and raise awareness around. You have to have built trust to get “rolling” with this.
If your communications team has been aware, it’s been “loving up” partner organizations for a while and really leveraging Twitter (and possibly LinkedIn) to be seen as a voice for the social good of biking and community involvement. But, you didn’t see it coming (!?) or it was just too far beyond your quarterly sales goals to bother with?
Well, you are now flat-footed when it comes to aligning with this ENERGIZED, happy, active, engaged group of people in a wide age range who are looking for bike-focused lifestyles that are a win-win-win.
How can your brand possibly get involved now? I’ve got ideas and well-established, deep networks.
One – there’s an incredible film about to be released for screenings that could positively impact the lives of many families in your community: Motherload. Buy a screening packet, partner with your local bike shop, find another nonprofit to benefit and make it a lovefest of positivity that creates more community resilience. I am here to help you strategically develop your event.
Two– get educated as a business/enterprise about how you can transition at least some of your local deliveries to an eCargoBike fleet. North American cities are so far behind the EU, so the knowledge and policy changes and best practices exist for you to get up to speed faster than you think. I have co-founded VeloLogistics coalition to gather together information, share resources, build engagement, host cargo bike fests and a future business summit. Stay tuned – but see also this LI Group we just launched: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13718357/
Three – Find your business’s unique bike-alignment angle and mine all the possibilities. Plan for it to be one of your key marketing themes for the next 5-10 years. The IPCC climate report named transportation one of its top four sectors that could positively impact our horrible climate change situation in that very short time frame. There are SO many media stories, partnerships, events, and conferences your leadership could be involved in, in so many innovative ways. That’s what I do: I see those opportunities, I connect dots (locally, nationally and globally) and help you think much bigger than you ever have about how your business could gain visibility and have social impact (and sell product) all at once.
It is pretty late to get going with all of this bike world love, but I’m here to jumpstart your vision and leverage the existing opportunities. And, wow – as I monitor conversations and connect with global leaders in this movement- am I ever INSPIRED. There likely IS a way you can get in on it and benefit your brand and your community. Start by emailing me: andrea@andrealearned.com . Or, for immediate strategic advice on upcoming conferences or bike-aligning opportunities you’d like to explore, I love helping clients via the one-on-one video call, CommonGenius platform: https://commongenius.com/expert-consultant/andrea-learned .
FUN!! COMMUNITY!! RESILIENCE!! CLIMATE ACTION !!
#bikes4all #bikes4climate
Photo credit: Photo by Jannis Lucas on Unsplash