A business history of the bicycle industry. shaping marketing practices

The book is not a global history of the bicycle industry in the strict sense of covering the entire world, nor does it offer portraits of individual countries. The approach has been necessarily selective given that no useful records of the bicycle industry is available. The first chapter examines the manufacturing of bicycles. The chapter expands its focus from how a bicycle is manufactured to the key categories of firms participating in the business system adopted within the bicycle industry. The second chapter discusses the data available to understand the bicycle market. A selection of five statistics is presented through examples based on primary and secondary data drawn from several countries. The third chapter examines the bicycle marketing focusing on its three pillars, which consist of understanding customers through market segmentation, designing a market offering for those customers who bicycle firms choose to serve, and using sports as a marketing tool. The last chapter provides an extensive exemplification of how a North-American bicycle firm, Cannondale Corporation, managed its marketing activity in Europe during a twenty-year time frame.