What makes the Rapha Cycling Club a great loyalty program?
I will never understand people who exercise outside.
The variable weather, the danger from other people, the insects. Give me a Peloton and an indoor gym every day of the week.
Ideally, air conditioned.
However, there are those hardier souls who love to get into the great outdoors for their exercise. Amongst that group, Cyclists are some of the most hardcore.
People who clad their frames in skin-tight Lycra and set out on the roads, pathways, mountains and cycle lanes, alone or in groups, braving traffic, pedestrians, and all manner of other dangers.
They obsess about their bikes and gear (you can never have enough bikes apparently), clothing, nutrition, power output, Strava status and more.
And it is in this world in which we can find what I believe is one of the most impressive loyalty programs in the world — The Rapha Cycling Club.
Who are Rapha?
Rapha Performance Roadwear is a cycling lifestyle brand focused on road bicycle racing and mountain biking clothing and accessories formed in the UK in 2004.
It operates in the high price segment of the cycling clothing market but its stuff is widely considered to be great quality (if potentially overpriced).
Its stated aim is ‘to inspire the world to live life by bike’, and it has grown to generate over 100 million pounds annually. A huge part of its success is the Rapha Cycling Club which launched in 2007.
I have worked in Loyalty for 25 years and have been fortunate to run and build some big loyalty programs in my time. So what do I like so much about Rapha?
1. It's not just about getting stuff — they truly have built a community
Harvard Business School professors Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria developed a behavioural model that states that humans all are largely driven by four biological drives:
- The drive to acquire
- The drive to defend
- The drive to learn and comprehend
- The drive to bond
This model can act as a way to categorise the mechanics of a specific loyalty program and which motivation levers they are trying to pull to deliver against its objectives.
Now a program can have benefits in more than one of these areas area but in general, it will have a centre of gravity. Let's have a look at some examples for each drive.
Drive to Acquire
This covers any program that enables members to earn points, discounts, offers, or exclusive products and is the norm for most loyalty programs.
Examples: Tesco Clubcard, MyMcDonald’s Rewards
Drive to Defend
You see this in any program that is built around status levels and the need to maintain them. Airline loyalty programs are a great example — I had a friend fly from Sydney to Melbourne and back in a day just to maintain the QANTAS Gold status.
Examples: QANTAS Frequent Flyer, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
Drive to Learn
This pertains to any benefits where you can get access to master classes or exclusive content from experts as a reason to join. It is certainly pretty rare as a core mechanic.
Examples: Canon Club
Drive to Bond
These programs focus on building and supporting a vibrant community. One that gets people together physically or virtually. One that creates connections, celebrates achievements and generally is built around social connection.
Examples: Rapha Cycling Club
In the diagram below you can see the benefits associated with becoming a member of the RCC and that they have chosen to focus on the drive to Bond as primary motivation with the Drive to Acquire as secondary.
Putting in the effort
Just because you have a bunch of members in a loyalty program supposedly built around the Drive to Bond, it does not make them a thriving community.
A community does not just happen — it needs impetus, drive, organisation and inspiration to get people together.
Especially at the beginning.
There are many examples of brands that purport to build a community but do very little to create any vibrancy (I’m looking at you Canon Club) but Rapha have gone hard to build a community in several ways.
Their network of Clubhouses
Rapha has 22 Clubhouse locations globally which act as community hubs where members can come and enjoy half-price coffee, rent a high-end bike or check out the latest Rapha gear.
But they also act as the focal point for rides organised by Rapha staff and over 600 Ride Leaders, as well as social events that bring riders together.
Their presence in Zwift
Zwift is a video game-like environment where riders pedal on an indoor bike and their in-game avatar cycles around 12 different virtual worlds.
The harder you pedal, the faster you go.
You can ride with thousands of other riders on Zwift, join group rides and races, do structured workouts or just join one of the worlds and ride solo.
It uses gamification to encourage you to improve your fitness — all in the service of Zwift’s mantra of ‘Fun is fast’.
Whilst there are a few similar products Zwift is almost certainly the most popular with reportedly more than half a million people having signed up.
Rapha knows that not every rider can get to a Clubhouse, so other ways of connecting their community that aren’t dependent on geography are crucial to the growth of the program and the brand.
A presence on Zwift is a great way to achieve that.
So Ride Leaders also operate in its virtual world. Members can participate in RCC member rides, join the Rapha_RCC Official Club to monitor their stats and fly the RCC colours virtually — more on that later.
Flagship rides
Rapha has several recurring flagship rides that bring together its community across the globe.
The most famous of these (or maybe notorious) is the Festive 500. Here’s how Rapha describes it:
The greatest riding challenge of them all assumes its usual slot at the end of the calendar year. Sign up to the Festive 500 for a holiday season you’ll never forget. 500km. 8 days. 24–31 December. It’s a perfectly balanced challenge, and the perfect excuse to eat whatever you want afterwards.
Sounds ghastly to me but to each their own.
The Festive 500 can be done in the real world or Zwift and relies on ride telemetry data. Some hardy souls try and do all 500km in one go!
The point however is that it brings together members across the world to all experience the same event, at the same time and even document their efforts on social media and YouTube. This common experience brings the community together.
The tools to organise
It is very difficult to organise large groups of human beings. Anyone who has tried to organise a wedding or even a Sunday lunch with friends knows it can be like herding kittens.
To make organising all these members doable, Rapha created their app.
It is a social network unto itself where members can see what rides and social events are happening at their clubhouse, online in Zwift or just in their area. Hell, they can even organise one if they want to.
It also houses their membership card and a chat functionality where ride leaders and members can converse, organise rides and generally get to know each other.
It seems to be well-liked with a current rating on the App Store of 4.6 out of 5 and as a secondary benefit, I am sure it generates Rapha a metric tonne of data about the vibrancy of their community, the current issues people are having, thoughts about latest product releases and more.
In short, Rapha doesn’t say they have a community when they don't — they have actually put the time, effort and resources to build a hugely impressive one.
2. They use loss aversion to amplify the benefits of the program
In recent years, the loyalty industry has seen the rise of paid-for Reward programs largely influenced by the rampant success of Amazon Prime (which I have written about here).
To paraphrase that article, the fact that Amazon Prime has a price point for entry is crucial to their success.
It is crucial because it plays into the psychology of sunk costs and loss aversion.
A sunk cost is money that has already been spent and cannot be recovered. As a result, the rational move with any sunk cost is to ignore it dispassionately when making decisions — the money is spent and there’s nothing you can do about it.
But as Behavioural Science tells us, people are not rational.
Fans who paid £100 for a concert ticket will drive into a blizzard to get there while fans who got tickets free would think better of it. Businesses continue to invest in failing projects because they’ve spent so much already.
This irrationality is driven by loss aversion. Paying £100 for a ticket and not attending feels like losing £100 even though the money has been spent and there’s nothing you can do to get it back. Similarly, the more you use something you have paid for the better you feel about the purchase.
As a result, paying £70 for an RCC membership contributes to customers wanting to get the most out of that investment so that they don’t see it as wasted money.
This in turn increases the odds that they make the most of the benefits they are paying for and buy more Rapha products which in turn generates more revenue.
3. It creates and reinforces mental availability.
Mental availability is the likelihood that a buyer will notice, recognize and/or think of a brand in buying situations.
Therefore, it is about memory and the need to build and reinforce brand-linked memory structures that make the brand easier to notice and buy.
One of the ways a brand does that is by creating distinctive brand assets.
If I showed you a Nike Swoosh, played you the “I’m lovin’ it” jingle or presented you with the silhouette of a Coke bottle you would instantly be able to tell me the brand's name.
These distinctive brand assets or “codes” are ingrained in our brains and are mental shortcuts that create familiarity. In psychological terms, familiarity does not breed contempt. Instead, it creates a positive attitude towards said brand.
Rapha has been able to turn cyclists into brand ambassadors every time they go cycling clad with the distinctive brand assets that are the Rapha Cycling Club colours and logos. Whether in the real world or the virtual world of Zwift.
They smartly give each new member of the RCC a free cycling cap when they join and if the rider is a member of Zwift they can get virtual Rapha colours by redeeming their code from their welcome email.
This is a huge plus for the RCC and Rapha has smartly leaned into it.
The Bottom Line
Rapha is a somewhat divisive brand in the world of cycling. Some call them overpriced and overhyped—a poseurs brand.
But their success is undeniable, driven in no small part by the success of the RCC.
So what are the key lessons from RCC?
Figure out what motivational drive or drives are the most appropriate for your loyalty program — what works for your business, your brand and your objectives?
Invest in whatever you choose. Rapha went after one of the most labour-intensive centres of gravity — the drive to bond. A concept that demands investment in people and time — it's not a set-and-forget approach at all.
But they went for it, continue to invest and are reaping the benefits. It is a core part of the growth of their brand. The value has allowed them to justify the cost of entry for a member and reap the loss aversion benefits of that cost.
Use it to reinforce your brand and increase mental availability if you can. If your program can be recognisably seen in the world it can be a hugely valuable distinctive asset in creating mental availability.
Right, I’m off to go and exercise indoors…
I am a Senior Marketing Consultant with over 20 years of experience across both client and agency side specialising in CRM, CX and Loyalty. I have applied my knowledge across brands as diverse as Vodafone, McDonald’s, Volkswagen, Disney, Gumtree, Activision Blizzard and GAME.
If you liked this article please check out:
- my other articles here
- the ‘Everybody hates your brand’ podcast which I co-host.
