Building communities has increasingly become a focus for brands that want to connect with customers on a personal level. However, it’s not straightforward to achieve community, especially as brand fans can spot inauthenticity a mile off.  

For Brompton Bicycle, the folding bike company founded in 1975 by inventor Andrew Ritchie, community is integral to its business.  

“We haven’t gone out trying to create communities,” says global marketing director Chris Willingham. “They’ve just evolved and we’re very careful not to overstep, and try and nudge them in any particular direction when that love for a brand, in most cases, is really quite rare.” 

A third of Brompton’s sales come through word of mouth, according to tracking. However, Willingham reckons it’s “more like half” given the strength of its community.

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Willingham joined Brompton last summer after leaving his role as chief marketing officer at Australian clothing brand R.M.Williams and spent many years agency-side working on clients like Nike, Mars, PepsiCo and P&G.  

Brompton’s community takes centre stage in its new brand platform ‘Life Unfolded’, which aims to celebrate the brand’s 50th anniversary and more than 1.2 million bikes sold by focusing on fans’ love of the brand. 

Reflecting on the role of community at brands he’s worked with in the past, Willingham explains you expect to have “big community followings and they do – but nothing quite like this.”  

Pursuing ‘aggressive’ growth

The platform, created with agency The Liberty Guild, is for the long-term.  

“We’re at that time now in our lifecycle where we need something brings the brand together at that high order level,” explains Willingham.

The intention is to “unite the Brompton brand around the world”, to both put the community at the heart and enable the business to achieve “some very ambitious business objectives”. 

Brompton has fan communities in the multiple hundreds and estimates they spent a collective 27,500 hours socialising on Bromptons in 2024.  

Now the business is “looking to grow at an aggressive rate”, says Willingham, who believes establishing a brand platform was a “business imperative” to achieve this goal

The launch of Life Unfolded follows a poor financial year for Brompton. Profits declined by more than 99% in its most recent full accounts published in January, which cover the 12 months to the end of March 2024.

Profits fell from £10.7m to £4,602, with managing director Will Butler-Adams attributing the firm’s financial woes to discounting in the cycling sector and poor recovery post-pandemic. Sales were down 5.3% to £122.6m.

Turning this around to achieve business growth means refocusing on its proposition, investing in brand building and growing in new markets. Brompton’s biggest market is China, closely followed by Germany and home market the UK.

“We’ve only scratched the surface in China,” says Willingham.

The brand has stores in three cities there, so there’s untapped opportunity. Japan and Korea are also high on the list for expansion.  

But, he adds, what he loves most about his job is “creating those big brand properties and then executing against those across the full breadth of touchpoints”.  

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The opportunity to create something new was one of the draws for Willingham, especially as Brompton had been without a marketing leader for six months.

“It’s probably fair to say it [the marketing team] wasn’t functioning the way it could,” he admits.  

Willingham acknowledges new leaders often inherit a team that may not align with their ambitions or expectations, but says at Brompton he’s been “very fortunate” in the team structure that preceded him. Of course, some changes have been made.

“We have tinkered with it a bit,” he says. “What we realised was we’re relatively small.”

The team has a “fantastic” strategist based in Shanghai and works closely with The Liberty Guild, but there were gaps to plug and areas to grow internally.  

Brompton has “beefed up” its internal content team so it can create more content for social media, which Willingham describes as “a necessary thing to do”. Many brands are moving more budget into social media. Indeed a rebound in marketing budget growth in July was driven by short-term media, according to IPA’s July Bellwether report.  

He’s also brought in a team to look at Brompton’s customer database, which the marketing boss argues “wasn’t really being optimised” before. It’s a “big step forward” for the brand, he claims. 

Beyond this, the shape of the team won’t change much. Of course, AI is having an impact on many – if not all – marketing teams. Brompton is “starting to use it more”, says Willingham, who insists it is still a “people business.”  

Tackling the ‘biggest’ challenge

“We’re a 50-year old brand, but we’re not for everyone,” admits Willingham. “Awareness is probably the biggest challenge.”  

He describes the brand’s likely customers as “non-conformist” given the bike’s unusual nature.

“We have small wheels and a silhouette that isn’t for everyone,” he says.  

This brand push is about getting more people not just to know what Brompton is, but to consider the role the brand plays in customers’ lives “both functionally and emotionally”. The brand consideration factor is another “big challenge”. 

“We’ve sold 1.2 million bikes and it’s taken quite a long time over many years. We want to repeat that number, but much quicker and that’s the big challenge for us now, to bring in the next generation of Bromies,” says Willingham.  

Yes, Bromies – it’s the label Brompton’s fans use to self-describe. It’s one Willingham encourages.

CEO at The Liberty Guild, Jon Williams, describes Bromies as “an army of passionate brand advocates, which is so rare” and helpful for both brand and agency when strategising the brand campaign.  

Brompton’s cheapest bike costs £950, rising to £5,699. It’s a specialist product, but the brand is now in a place to offer alternative models.  

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The company offers leasing and renting bikes through subscription models to “give people more options as to how they want to interact with the Bromption”, Willingham explains.

“It’s to help people understand that you haven’t just got to buy one. For some younger people, that price point might be a bit off-putting,” he says. 

While Brompton’s bikes are at the premium end of the pricing scale, they’re not a regular repeat purchase for the average customer. This does bring up the issue of customer lifetime value.

“It’s an area we’re picking up on,” says Willingham. “It’s wonderful to be able to sell a product that lasts a lifetime, but how do you maximise lifetime value?”

The brand is making “more and more” of its own parts and accessories, although there are a number of third-parties offering their own.

“That’s a natural consequence of having a bike that’s 50-years old and is widely loved, but that’s an area of growth for us,” he adds. 

Another way of extracting value is Brompton’s servicing capability. It’s a proposition the brand has “underuntilised”, but is now paying more attention to.