Why Leading Brands Come to Backbone for Marketing

Backbone’s Foundational Philosophy of Brand, Community, and Performance

Written by Andy Ralston, Senior Director of Strategy

Over the past year at Backbone, we’ve taken stock of our expanded service offering, and in doing so we’ve emerged with a refocused and codified core strategic philosophy. It’s simple but contains multitudes. We call it BCP, or Brand, Community, and Performance. 

What BCP Isn’t

First, let’s dispel some potential points of confusion. 

Not a funnel. BCP is not a funnel, nor is it a customer journey, both of which are structures for sequential messaging in which brands speak to consumers at different points of need, desire, or intention. The BCP strategy lives alongside the customer journey but does not replace it. It articulates an essential, holistic position that generates longevity, builds brand, and keeps an eye on the bottom line. 

Not a fixed state. BCP is not a fixed state, nor is it expressed in a single moment in time. It’s a dynamic balance that fluctuates over time, with investment in brand-building, deep connections, or commerce goals shifting throughout the weeks, months, and years. 

Not branding. “Brand,” in BCP, is not just about branding. It’s about building brand through a groundswell of big and small moves that help consumers believe in what you have to offer. 

Not optional. For brands big and small in the active lifestyle space and beyond to succeed in the short and long term, each piece of the BCP strategic pie is essential.

What BCP Is

BCP is a three-legged stool, with each component essential to success for the kinds of brands Backbone works with. 

In short:

• Brand efforts help brands reach new consumers by going broad.
• Community efforts build credibility and foundational authenticity by going deep.
• Performance efforts connect all other legs of the stool to commerce outcomes.

Again, it’s tempting to think of each of these pillars as analogous to a phase in the funnel (awareness, consideration, conversion), but as we’ll explore below, that would be misleading and leave out nuances that help unlock new strategic directions. 

Community: The Value of Deep Connections

Matt Klein, Head of Foresight at Reddit, wrote in 2023 that, “Our current task at hand isn't so much to chase cultural change and react, but to work with existing communities, fantasize what we'd like to see with them, and then invest in them.” Nowhere is this sentiment more true than with brands seeking to connect with active consumers, where people aren’t looking to brands to articulate a near-universal, celebrity-endorsed feeling, nor a solution to an everyday problem. Here, credibility reigns supreme, and deep community connections create that credibility.

Take longtime Backbone client YETI Coolers as an example. Their story is well known by now, but to summarize: YETI was born out of the niche salt-water fly fishing community, and as such, they had to first prove that the product would stand up to the demands of the fishing pursuit before the community would embrace the brand. As other, more mass-market cooler brands were positioning themselves in a fight for big-box-store shelf space, YETI doubled down on fishing and hunting ambassadors through a grassroots, people-first approach. Even while expanding to new product categories and a broader mainstream presence, YETI continued to invest in the people, publications, and projects driving the energy forward in its most relevant communities, including mountain sports, culinary, surfing, and eventually numerous other pursuit-based groups, embodying a depth-before-breadth approach at every step. 

Brand: Growing Beyond the Core

Deep community connections drive credibility and affinity among those who are already close to the core of a pursuit, but only limited success that can be gained from looking inward. As brands seek to look outward, go bigger and broader, and welcome new people into their vision, it’s all about amplifying and retaining community credibility and leveraging it to build greater visibility. 

For brands that offer mass-market products (CPG, restaurant chains, etc.), articulation of a brand comes from a kind of myth-building exercise. Nike is an archetypal winner; Apple is a creator of tools that unlock human potential; Geico is a gecko, Progressive is Flo, State Farm is Jake. Each has its own mythology based in abstract consumer segmentation that informs long-term storytelling and builds semiotic, media-based relationships between the consumer and brand. 

On the other hand, for mid-size and large brands serving active consumers, brand-building expressed just through a brand’s mythology can only take us so far and can even risk diluting the credibility that these brands must retain. Put more plainly, a story is only a story without the credibility built from cultural validation in active communities.

So how can a brand build on community credibility to create broader reach through brand-building efforts? In collaboration with Altra Running, Backbone helped build both community depth and brand breadth for the Experience a New High campaign. With deep roots in trail running and a niche community of brand loyalists, Altra’s goal with the campaign was to build relevance with a new generation of runners—namely, younger female road runners. With a strong creative concept from Altra, Backbone built targeted breadth through a mix of high-impact out of home throughout Denver, digital out of home at the Denver airport to reach active travelers in transit, a summer-long sponsorship of the perpetually sold-out Yoga on the Rocks series, grassroots engagements with run clubs, and the merging of IRL, guerrilla-style stencil out of home along sponsored Strava segments, and a 12-stop “Dopamine Dealer” event tour. The campaign was a 360º center of gravity for young Colorado runners to enter Altra’s world while retaining the brand’s core credibility at every step. 

Performance: Connecting to Commerce

Chatter among marketing and media insiders over the past couple years has often included some variation of the question, “Does performance marketing take away from brand building?” 

It’s a valid question. Algorithmic targeting has largely overtaken control of audience definition, creative differentiation, and even media strategy for brands that spend heavily on performance channels. But within the BCP framework, there’s an opportunity to let each leg of the stool do what it does best, while maximizing the combination of the three. 

For rapid-growth companies seeking quick returns, a deep reliance on performance tactics may not be very consequential. In their quest to generate sales in the near term, such brands can efficiently and effectively drive quick growth and returns without brand- or community-building efforts. But brands that seek to achieve long-term brand health and sustained growth must achieve a marketing mix that will generate sustained interest that exists independent from the addictive drip of fast-ROAS performance channels. 

In a digital media environment with “awareness” objectives on performance platforms, it’s easy to forget that bringing new people toward a brand includes reaching them in a pre-need state. That means we must reach them before they visit a relevant website that can serve as retargeting fodder, before they indicate interest in a product category via Google search, or before they’ve set themselves down the digital path toward a purchase and before they’ve given an algorithm some signal that they might be ready to make a click or purchase. 

This is all to say that performance tactics should not solely carry the burden of long-term brand-building. But performance tactics thrive as a sophisticated and ever-evolving hand-off from concerted efforts in community roots and brand extension toward a commerce outcome. 

On performance channels, Backbone and Smartwool make relevance the brand’s “true north,” dividing its audience into passion-led “aspirationals” and intent-based “buying targets” so every touchpoint feels personal. It then uses interest signals to deliver activity-specific creative (like breathable-sock ads for runners), a tactic that helped pushed significantly elevate conversion rates. The Smartwool approach shows us just how fruitful performance marketing can be when it augments instead of replacing brand and community strategies. 

Performance marketing should be thought of as much closer to point of sale than brand and community efforts. In a time when digital commerce occurs not only on DTC websites, but across online retailers, in-platform on social channels, within search results, and in AI chatbot responses, performance ads are akin to an in-store display—albeit a display that understands its targets’ interests, habits, and digital history. 

Where Backbone Fits In

Performance agencies aren’t unique, nor are agencies that can produce wide-reaching global campaigns, nor boutique shops that connect with nice communities. What is unique, however, is to bring together deep community connections, brand-building scale, and commerce-driven performance under one agency’s roof. 

After nearly three decades of growth from an ultra-niche PR firm focused on climbing and backcountry skiing to an agency that represents numerous category-leading brands in an active lifestyle market that comprises at least 140 million consumers in the U.S., Backbone has evolved into a one-of-a-kind intersection of brand, community, and performance strategies. This allows us to connect depth, breadth and commerce outcomes in a way that no active-lifestyle-focused agency has been able to do in the past. And it’s a testament to the growth and maturation of the active lifestyle industry that such an approach is now feasible. 

If you’d like to learn more about our BCP philosophy and how Backbone might be able to help your brand, reach out to us at info@backbone.media. 

About the Author

Andy Ralston is Senior Director of Strategy at Backbone Media. He leads brand and communications strategy across Backbone and sister agency rygr, applying past lives in classical music and book publishing to craft resonant narratives. When he isn’t mapping frameworks, he’s Nordic skiing, trail running, or foraging in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley.

About Backbone

Backbone is an integrated marketing agency headquartered in Carbondale, Colorado—about 30 minutes from Aspen, but a world away from the traditional agency mold. What started 28 years ago as a social experiment to see if world-class marketing work could be done from a mountain town has grown into a nationally recognized agency serving some of the most iconic names in the active lifestyle space, including YETI, Dickies, Smartwool, Thule, and AG1. With services across paid and earned media, Backbone sits at the intersection of brand, community, and performance—building influence from the inside out, scaling authentic stories across every channel, and driving measurable impact through custom analytics. We believe in work that moves people—in the physical sense and otherwise: moving the needle for brands, moving consumers down the funnel, and moving our clients towards their key communities.