From the article. The HR CEO Julie is joining the directors at IM. Is that the person you know? It doesn’t say about the rest of the team.
It would be interesting to know how much IM paid for HR. They run a relatively small number of events and I doubt if they make that much out of them.
HR had a major expansion of its’ calendar a few years ago, but I got the impression that it just resulted in their customer base being more thinly spread across events rather than growing the customer base, so lots of the new events were culled.
Its almost like they are just trying to buy anything that moves to snuff out any possible competition. Triathlon is now ripe for someone to come in and blow apart Ironman with the right backing and not being entirely about the bottom line, but it needs a name to get venues off the ground, and some pretty good venues, a Macca for instance. Sutto’s plans a few years back would have been great with the prize money and prize draw options but for the guys reputation meaning it never stood a chance.
There’s certainly evidence of IM being dicks. Remember they dropped the superb St Polten 70.3, and Challenge took up the venue/event. Then Ironman started IM70.3 Graz, and did it on the same day as Challenge St Polten. SMH. No-one really wins here. Put a few months between them and both races thrive.
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I think the draw of the IM brand is too strong for anyone competing against them in the mass participation market. Challenge is the only alternative that comes close and they are a long way behind.
Any rival pro series without the income from a large AG field has to be reliant on a generous benefactor to fund it and that feels like a pretty fragile business model.
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Hot Chillee in good shape?
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I was talking to my brother in the car about branding. He’s involved a fair bit with the BMC and they had a disastrous campaign to rebrand themselves a few years ago - dealing with a hardcore contingent resistant to change - a common thing apparently. He points out that you have to look ahead to attract future customers not worry excessively about the old core.
I didn’t know this but apparently marketing a company involves choosing one of 12 basic jungian-like archetypes - rebel, ruler, magician, the explorer, creator etc etc … I guess Nike was rebel, but have become something else. I’m guessing a lot of you know all about this… maybe fill in the gaps
So IM yeah they’re branding is super strong 
… which one are they? 
… hero, explorer, winner? It obviously works - has such a strong origin story
I’ve said this before….I think a merge between SLT and PTO events could be really interesting, and potentially a very serious threat to IM. SLT have all the marketing and social media skills and the ITU relationship, and an interesting brand with an interesting mix of participants… with PTO a bit more long course oriented and with real cash as well as apparently some sophisticated access to media production, they could bring together a lot of the superstars from across the entire sport, and then they might be able to get an interesting hold on the whole thing, with a widely recognised world ranking table, and creative new ideas like team racing that IM just don’t seem to have the culture to drive…. that could get IM a bit wobbly IMO.
Looking at the Collins cup at the moment, and at the SLT teams stuff just starting up, they’re both making IM look amateurish in regards to media management, and that’s the battle ground. It just takes opinion to shift a bit to seeing something new and exciting as much cooler than IM and they’re f****d.
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I guess IM’s ‘game’ is the AG pool though isn’t it. The pro race is almost the excuse to get the whole thing running. IM would only need to worry if the pros started to move elsewhere or begin to lose the ‘need’ to do IM. How long would that then take to have a ripple through the AG/mass participation ranks. Would it even? I mean if the pros didn’t turn up to London mara, they’d still probably sell out every year as most people don’t even care about that side of the race.
I think the difficulty is for IM to decide how they want to continue to be perceived if this threat does materialise.
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Yeah, Ironman is ‘lazy’ about PR & Marketing, because the brand has been so aspirational in the last decade or more, that it hasn’t needed to do anything of substance in this respect; including worrying too much about the Pros. It’s a participation not spectator sport.
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Ironman™ is the Hoover of the triathlon world. Everyone will still call it Ironman long after they have gone out of business and a shiny new brand has replaced it.
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wasn’t always so. For me, the seismic shift came when HIMs became known as Ironman 70.3 because that was when you first saw the logo on anything that wasn’t a full distance.
It pulled in the I’ve done an Ironman now’ crowd. Whereas before, for us dinosaurs, Ironman was bestowed to anyone that a race of 140.6 (and still is in my book)
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Tbf, that’s the same as a Marathon in that ostensibly it’s a set distance and format and was conceived with that name (in the case of IM). A 2.4/112/26.2 will always be an “Ironman” distance triathlon.
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IM may become a victim of its own success. One and dones are not profitable, IM needs recurring revenue from people doing multiple events.
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Or different markets, HR and UTMB
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and that’s kind of my point that both PTO and SLT have a model that ‘might’ make recurring customers more possible through things like league tables, team events, and series oriented competition.
I look at things on a smaller scale, like local cross country leagues, and they get participants, not because of the specific race, but because of the league tables and club on club competition aspects…. that’s a model IM aren’t even close to replicating.
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And they are unlikely to as how many people can afford or want to afford a monthly £300-500 race for their team.
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The way I look at it is that 140.6 is an Ironman. Nothing to do with the brand.
That’s what they called the first winner.
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Interestingly GTN has done a show where they suggest that the IM World Championships should not be held in Kona. The majority of the comments seem to support the poposal. When I suggested this on IMJ last year the ammount of hate I received overwhelming.
It seems to me like there are many people who think that this is a good idea, just avoid saying so in IMJ because the place is too toxic
Fully agree. And a 70.3 is not an Ironman, even if the brand says that it is
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