When Everyone on Trail Uses It, Is That Marketing?
Before a piece of gear can prove itself to us, something has to convince us to try it. Sometimes that something is everyone else.
There is a pair of Altras in the upper-right corner of this photograph.
I took it before starting my Appalachian Trail thru-hike in 2016. Like a lot of first-time thru-hikers, I laid out nearly everything I thought I’d need and took a picture.
Sleeping bag. Pack. Trekking poles. Stove. Headlamp. Water bottles.
And those Altras.
I hadn’t thru-hiked a single mile in them.
Yet somehow, before I’d ever walked from Georgia to Maine, I’d already decided those were the shoes I should wear to try.
Ten years later, I’m less interested in whether they were the right shoes for me than in a much more difficult question:
Why did I buy them?
Because I don’t remember an advertisement convincing me.
I remember other hikers.
I Was Watching Before I Was Hiking
During the winter of 2015–16, I was preparing for my northbound AT thru-hike while following Tom Gathman on Snapchat as he hiked southbound through winter.
Most hikers knew him as The Real Hiking Viking. These days I know him as Jabba and consider him a friend.
Back then, I was watching someone do the thing I was preparing to do.
I watched the trail. The weather. The suffering. The lifestyle.
And inevitably, the gear.
Jabba was associated with Altra during a period when the brand was becoming increasingly visible in long-distance hiking. Other prominent hikers wore Altras. Ordinary hikers wore them.
I can’t reconstruct exactly what convinced me to buy mine. Maybe I read reviews. Maybe someone recommended them. Maybe I liked the specifications.
Memory isn’t reliable enough ten years later to pretend otherwise.
But I know what the culture I was consuming looked like.
And there they are in my pre-hike photograph.
Altras.
Nobody gave them to me. I wasn’t sponsored.
In other words, I wasn’t being paid to participate in Altra’s growing adoption among thru-hikers.
I was paying to participate in it.
We Borrow Other Hikers’ Experience
That sounds more foolish than it actually is.
Imagine preparing for your first thru-hike.
You’re buying shoes for a journey of potentially thousands of miles without ever having walked thousands of miles.
How exactly are you supposed to know what works?
A few laps around a shoe store can’t tell you what mile 800 feels like.
So you borrow someone else’s experience.
What shoes do successful thru-hikers wear?
What packs?
What shelters?
What quilts?
If one experienced hiker uses something, that’s interesting.
If ten use it, that’s more interesting.
If it seems like everyone uses it, eventually the calculation reverses.
Buying the popular product doesn’t feel risky anymore.
Buying something else does.
That’s social proof, but on trail it often doesn’t feel anything like marketing.
It feels like evidence.
Altra Became the Evidence
My 2016 gear photograph captured me near the beginning of an adoption curve that would soon become difficult to ignore.
Halfway Anywhere’s annual PCT surveys provide a remarkable record of what happened.
In its 2016 PCT survey, the Lone Peak 3.0 wasn’t merely a popular shoe. It was the most frequently reported piece of gear hikers said they loved.
A year later, 51% of surveyed PCT finishers reported wearing Altra shoes.
The Lone Peak then remained the most common PCT shoe in Halfway Anywhere’s surveys year after year.
At some point, Altra crossed an important threshold.
The company no longer needed every prospective customer to encounter an Altra advertisement.
Thru-hikers were advertising the prevalence of Altra simply by walking around in them.
Not intentionally.
Not dishonestly.
Often not because of any relationship with the company whatsoever.
They were just wearing their shoes.
But imagine being a prospective thru-hiker watching from the outside.
You watch a PCT video.
You read a gear list.
You look through trail photographs.
You ask a finisher what shoes they wore.
Eventually the message becomes difficult to miss:
People who do this wear these.
Hiker #101
This is the person I find most interesting.
Imagine a company somehow gets its product onto 100 hikers.
How those first 100 got it could vary enormously.
Some paid full price. Some received discounts. Some got pro deals. Some were sponsored. Some received free products. Some bought theirs because they’d already seen somebody else using one.
But now there are 100 of them walking around.
Then comes Hiker #101.
They simply keep seeing the product.
Eventually Hiker #101 concludes:
There must be a reason everyone uses this thing.
And pulls out a credit card.
That’s the transaction that fascinates me.
The first 100 created prevalence.
Hiker #101 paid for the prevalence.
Nobody had to explicitly recommend the product to them.
The community itself became the recommendation.
You Don’t Have to Say Anything to Influence Someone
We tend to imagine influence as communication.
“These are the best shoes I’ve ever worn.”
“Use my discount code.”
“Thanks to Brand X for sponsoring my hike.”
Those are easy to recognize.
But some of the most powerful influence on trail is silent.
Sit outside a hostel and notice five people wearing the same shoes.
Walk into a shelter and see three of the same packs.
Watch enough YouTube videos and realize the same tent keeps appearing in the background.
Nobody told you to buy anything.
But you’ve learned something anyway:
This product is normal here.
That’s an incredibly powerful position for a brand.
Because once a product becomes culturally normal, the company doesn’t have to create every impression anymore.
The community does it for them.
But Where Did the Prevalence Come From?
This is the part consumers rarely get to see.
Did all 100 hikers independently decide this was the best product?
Were some sponsored?
Did some receive discounts?
Were products given away?
Did some simply copy the hikers who came before them?
Usually, we don’t know.
We only see the final result:
Prevalence.
And prevalence tends to erase its own origin.
Once enough people are using something, it can become nearly impossible for the next consumer to distinguish between a product that became ubiquitous through thousands of independent purchasing decisions and one whose initial visibility was heavily subsidized.
That doesn’t mean the resulting popularity isn’t genuine.
It means organic adoption can have a non-organic beginning.
My Altras Didn’t Last Long
The Altras in my gear photograph didn’t work particularly well for me.
By Franklin, North Carolina, I’d developed Achilles tendonitis.
Outdoor 76 put me into a pair of Dynafit, a company I had never even heard of.
I wore those for roughly the next 1,000 miles.
There’s another photograph from that hike of those shoes absolutely destroyed.
When they finally needed replacing, I bought the same Dynafits again and put over 700 miles on those.
The only major difference was the size.
My feet had changed enough during the hike that the replacement pair was two sizes larger.
That second purchase represents something completely different from the Altras in my pre-hike photograph.
I had 1,000 miles of personal proof.
That’s earned preference.
And it makes the first purchase even more interesting.
Before a product can prove itself through experience, something has to get it onto your body in the first place.
I took 2 photos of the same blaze on Peters Mountain, 4 months apart. Once during a shakedown hike and once during my thru hiker. Same blaze, same person, different perspective.
I Did It Again
The Altras weren’t the last time I did this.
Two years and 2,189 miles of experience later, I started the PCT carrying a Pa’lante V2 pack that was popular in the ultralight community.
This time I couldn’t blame inexperience. I was already a thru-hiker.
But I’d still borrowed someone else’s answer to a question I hadn’t fully answered for myself.
Once I started carrying the food and water my actual PCT hike required, the pack was miserable. I replaced it early in the desert before I even needed to add a bear can for the Sierras.
Experience hadn’t made me immune to social proof. It had just changed whose proof I trusted.
Can You Buy the Beginning?
A company cannot buy someone’s genuine experience.
It can’t make a bad shoe comfortable for 2,000 miles.
It can’t force someone to recommend a product they hate.
But it can buy the beginning.
Sponsorships can put products onto hikers.
So can pro deals, ambassador programs, free samples, creator programs and giveaways.
None of those can guarantee genuine adoption.
But they can increase the number of people the next hiker sees using the product.
And if a company can get enough products into a sufficiently interconnected community, something interesting becomes possible.
The company may not need every initial recipient to become a customer.
Those people can instead create the conditions that produce the next customer.
Collectively, they create visibility.
And Hiker #101 doesn’t necessarily know where that visibility came from.
They just know they’ve seen the product everywhere.
That’s Where Marketing Becomes Culture
This doesn’t require manipulation.
That’s important.
A company can genuinely want people to experience its product.
Every participant can be acting honestly.
A hiker can receive something for free and genuinely love it. They can recommend it sincerely. Someone else can rationally use that recommendation to make a purchasing decision.
Yet something that began with subsidized distribution can eventually become completely genuine organic adoption.
Maybe that’s why asking whether something is “organic” or “marketing” isn’t particularly useful.
The more interesting question is:
Where did the cycle begin?
Because popularity doesn’t merely result from purchasing decisions.
Eventually, popularity can cause purchasing decisions.
And once that happens, marketing has begun turning into culture.
Then I Met the Guy I’d Been Watching
A few months after following The Real Hiking Viking on Snapchat, I walked into Trail Days during my own AT thru-hike.
And I met Tom.
I still have a photograph of us together.
Today it’s funny to look at.
We’re friends now.
But when that picture was taken, I was meeting someone I’d watched from home while trying to figure out how to become a thru-hiker.
I had studied a culture I wanted to join.
I watched the people already inside it.
Years later, I can look at my pre-hike gear photograph and see the result sitting right there in the upper-right corner.
A pair of Altras.
Did Tom influence that purchase?
Maybe.
Did dozens of hikers collectively influence it?
Probably.
Did reviews, specifications and recommendations play a role?
Almost certainly.
I can’t honestly reconstruct it.
And that’s almost the point.
The influence worked without leaving a receipt.
Look at Your Own Gear
Pick something you carried on your first long-distance hike.
Your shoes.
Your pack.
Your tent.
Your quilt.
Now ask a surprisingly difficult question:
Why did you buy that one?
Not why you kept it.
Not whether it turned out to be good.
Why did you choose it before you knew?
Maybe you did exhaustive research.
Maybe a trusted friend recommended it.
Maybe a store employee fitted you.
But maybe you’d simply seen it enough times that it felt like the obvious choice.
That’s worth recognizing, especially in a community that likes to believe gear earns its reputation exclusively through performance.
Performance matters enormously.
The trail eventually gets its vote.
But before the trail can tell you whether something works, something has to convince you to give it the opportunity.
Sometimes that’s an advertisement.
Sometimes it’s a review.
Sometimes it’s a friend.
And sometimes it’s simply looking around and realizing that everyone else’s feet seem to be wearing the same shoes.
