On Page 3 and 4 of the October issue of Triathlete GU Energy Gel has the following text:
Are you racing in the lava fields this October? If so, GU sports has a little congrats present for you, a super sweet schwag-bag with your name on it ($175 value FREE)! No obligation or strings attached. If you qualified then go to www.gusports.com and sign up. Have a great race! Mahalo
*Now for the fine print: After 9 great years in the Lava Fields GU will unfortunately not be on course October 15, 2005. We wanted to be there but the billion dollar candy company shut us out.
Does anyone know the details of what happened and who is replacing them? I went to their website and didn’t see any mention of the free schwag.
I think the deal is that WTC has now limited expo booths to exhibiting products made by sponsors or products not made by any sponsor. PowerBar make gels, so none of the booths at IMH would be able to display or sell GU products. (Disclaimer–this is all second-hand info from an East-coast tri-store owner who was parked on the side of the side of Martin St. in Penticton repairing wetsuits. P.S. Thank you again for fixing my wetsuit.) I was at IMC this past weekend and the expo (under the new rules) was pathetic.
Amazing the lengths companies will go to in order to get what they feel they need. Bottom line: Will this help them check product through?
Will it leverage market share against PowerGel?
GU is a fine product, but this smacks of desperation. There is a lot of wisdom to picking your battles. There is a reason a 5 man team doesn’t take on a tank company.
GU is a fine product, but this smacks of desperation. There is a lot of wisdom to picking your battles. There is a reason a 5 man team doesn’t take on a tank company.
On the contrary… I think it shows resourcefulness. And I like the David taking on Goliath thing as well!
i’m so glad you said that. i’ve seen local half-marathons with far better scwag than IMC. my only complaint about the race…didn’t even walk away with a free water bottle. pathetic sums it up nicely.
Not to hijack the thread, but this is sort of related. Anyone heard about a Gatorade shortage? I got an e-mail update, from one of our local race directors, on an upcoming half marathon. Mentioned that unlike in previous years, they wont have gatorade on the course (they’re going to have another brand), citing a shortage of the product due to high demand caused by an unusually hot summer and the fact that a lot of it has been shipped to US troops overseas.
Just curious if anyone else had heard the same. Gatorade’s web site is so full of flash animations and other crap that you can’t find any information if you wanted to. I never thought I’d see the words “shortage” and “Gatorade” in the same sentence.
I heard the same thing from a convenience store i stop at usually on my long runs. they said they are normally only getting about 50% of what they order from Gatorade each time they receive a delivery. they sited the same reason - too much production going overseas… they still had some but not all sizes in all flavors.
It has to do with Gatorade and supplying the U.S. Army in Iraq. They thought they could send their powder over as part of their deal, but unreliable water over there had the military telling them that they had to ship their ready-to-drink bottles instead. Part of the reason Cytomax is trying to grab market share at the moment.
Scott - Thanks for the link. I was able to download the form from their website.
I don’t understand the logic behind only allowing one company per market segment in a race expo. Doesn’t it make more sense for a race expo to be a dynamic marketplace where you can compare products? Boston Marathon is sponsored by Adidas, but they don’t shut out the big Nike, Reebok, and Asics booths at their expo…
Desperation? Gorrilla marketing. Flashback a few years and I recall the pro athlete meeting in Hawaii where anyone not an PowerBar athlete prior coming to the island would be cut from the NBC coverage if they had a PowerBar logo. GatorBar/GatorLoad was the official bar/gel of Ironman and PowerBar was signing up folks with incentive deals. “Wear our logo or sticker and place X, we give you $$$” I watched a WTC employee threaten to call the cops if a guy with a PowerBar logo’d messenger bag did not get off the pier asap. And he was just sitting there watching his girlfriend’s stuff, but earlier had been handing out samples. PowerBar also managed to sneak a truck right after the last official truck of the parade that year and was throwing product to the crowd. Now they are the 900 lb gorrilla.
That same year or a year later another bar company parked a dock out on the swim course offering refresments and a place to stop. Not to mention a nice parking space for their banners just offshore of Lava Java. WTC had the dock removed.
Different year, different stuff inside the wrapper of the “official” product.
It really sucks how WTC has such a stranglehold on such issues. They seem to base each and every decision on what dollars go into their pocket. How tacky is it when the pre and post race dinners at Ironman have the separate cordoned-off areas for sponsors, with a better menu, wines, etc, while the rest of us eat so-so food, and watch the “privileged” ones munch on different menu. I know that one needs to “schmooze” sponsors, etc, but do they have to do it uner our very noses; those of us who fork out out massive entry fees, ecalating each year by $50. Use some tack, and remember who the customer is! Sorry to get a bit off track, but it is rediculous how they control all, including what you can purchase at the venu.
FYI…the WTC does not limit the expo per se to not allowing certain product to be sold or sampled from a conflict with a title spponsor. I can confirm this as working at the expo back in 2002 and 2003 for Clifbar. We will be back there on the island this year after a one year hiatus. We will be sampling all of our products lines (Clifbar, Builders Bar, Clifshot Gel, Clifshot Drink, and Shot Blocks http://www.clifbar.com/eat/shot_blok.cfm?location=shot) I have received confirmation from Ironman that we can distribute our product at the expo along with some promo items.
The thing about guerilla marketing is that there is a time and place to do it and at Hawaii Ironman is not really the place as the WTC will remember you the next year as the company that tried to “sneak” a free advertising opportunity.
As for GU it seems that they may have not wanted to fork over the cash for the expo (kinda steep booth rate) and got over bid by a company that may have deeper pockets…but I do not know the details.
Has anyone ever tried to set up an “alternative expo”? Why don’t the companies that are shut out of official booths create their own little expo down the street?
Yup … they are actually all over the place in town during race week … shops/vendors from out of town come in and lease space, or space within an existing store front, or display/sell in stores they are represented in for a period of time. I recall seeing Javelin, Reebok, Tyr, Orca, etc. … there is definatetely a presence from other folks besides the “official sponsors”