How many times, just for a name on the frame different from the brand of reference, have you found yourself not buying, or not being able to sell, a bicycle, or having to sell it off, as if it were material that is now “expired”? It doesn't matter if the type of carbon is the same, the geometries are excellent and the components are the same as the other bike, the name is simply Gotturnio and not Brandy (fancy names ... and what a fantasy!) We are still willing to spend thousands of euros in more to grab that brand. But what makes me think most is not the fact of wanting to spend thousands of euros more (there may be: that brand is cool, it has a beautiful color and the Times New Roman font they use is very captivating ...), but convincing oneself just that that bike is really better than another brand just because it knows how to advertise well.
Ok, maybe I'm entering a minefield, made up of banality and/or presumed pride of myself, almost like spitting on the plate where I'm eating, but I would like to make you think. Do we realize how much and how marketing influences our choices? We are sure that this consumerist society (where an extra centimeter of pivot should change our life), made of carbon frames, geometries revised every year, always leads to an improvement in our riding? Could it be that for our riding style a nice 26” DH in the Bike Park, perhaps paid €500, would be more beneficial? I know, nobody wants the 26” anymore: that's exactly why we pay €500 for it instead of €5250! Are you sure that a few cm difference in the wheel is worth this price? Let's take a modern enduro: I see many people switching to electric for the simple reason that they are often unable to pedal these "bicycles" with exaggerated travel/geometries, for many it's a pure effort uphill. But evaluate an all-mountain or a trail? I don't know, is it because you're really sure they don't "work" or because marketing didn't get us there? Have you ever wondered?
This summer, talking to a friend, he told me how he had had certain problems with electronics in a bike: an agony since, after having dreamed and bought this bike, he was about a month without being able to use it. However the epilogue was: however I am fine!
But if it had been a minor brand that had all these problems, how would we have judged it? If instead of the precious Brandy (always invented name) that we find on the front page of all the newspapers to launch its products, to enhance them, it had been Gotturnio, what would we have said? I'll tell you: Gotturnio would have closed instantly, no longer having the confidence of any buyer. Why have brands that were considered excellent a few years ago have now lost appeal just for the simple reason that the current champion no longer uses it? In the end it is a whole chain: we talk we talk but our sport is a passion and as such we cannot find anything rational in it. We all take turns falling into it.
Emotions count and these, at times, make us make senseless choices and we notice it when we talk to a person outside the sector or to our partner: who explains the price of a bike to his wife? Or a cost of 500 € just to have a stem that gives us 0.5% more smoothness? Of a ceramic pulley? A red gear cage instead of black? Of a colored ergal screw? To posterity, or to wives, the arduous sentence.
