Category: Branding

When it comes to offline community building around a brand, there are very few local examples as successful as “The Running Room”:http://www.runningroom.com/. But does this offline success translate into an equally persuasive online offering? Do they really “get” online?
If any of you are runners or even just like to walk your dog early on a Sunday morning, you will likely already know that the Running Room understands community building around a brand. Every Sunday morning at eight o’clock, outside of every Running Room outlet everywhere in Canada, there is a gaggle of hyped-up, spandex-clad runners in nice shoes and water bottle belts warming up for a run with their designated “community”. Whether you’re a slow 5K’r or a marathoner in training, there is a community of like-minded people waiting for you at the Running Room.
The Running Room, it seems, sells more than shoes. They sell a running lifestyle and they back it up by fostering an active community that lives this brand and congregates around their properties. In short, the Running Room is everything that an online social network aspires to be. Which made me wonder, what does their website look like and do they do as good of a job online as they do offline?
First, I need to be honest that I really did want their site to suck. It is always much more fun to write about a smart company caught with their pants down than to have to write about a smart company being smart. Unfortunately, this article will be the latter. With one notable exception, their site does a very good job of reinforcing their core offline values, online, and is a good example of a company leveraging their core strength through their online property.
Let’s look in more detail.

The homepage www.runningroom.com drives you immediately to the key content areas for their community (not their commerce): the “events” page, the community “forum” page, the “photos” page and other important pages designed to get you to put down the cheese doodles and go for a run. The “forum section”:http://www.runningroom.com/discussion/ is especially impressive with tens of thousands of entries around discussion threads on topics ranging from “running when you are pregnant”:http://www.runningroom.com/discussion/viewforum.php?f=6467&sid=b29b49074e0cc99d331ef9288b63f22b to “the right foods for a 10 km run”:http://www.runningroom.com/discussion/viewforum.php?f=16. It’s not the slickest discussion forum I’ve ever seen but it is well organized and clearly well used by their core community. Even the marginal runners have a home, where posts like this one entitled “I finally got bleeding nipples again!!”:http://www.runningroom.com/discussion/viewtopic.php?t=25650 chum up the waters for the “run till it hurts” crowd. Everywhere it’s community first, commerce second.