Raleigh’s new campaign celebrates cycling’s simple pleasures
Created by HarrimanSteel, Reasons to be Cheerful uses humour, authentic casting and everyday moments to reposition the bike brand for a new generation
British bicycle maker Raleigh may be best-known for the Chopper – a bona fide 70s cultural icon whose laid back design was immortalised on screen in The Goonies and more recently Stranger Things – but the 139-year-old brand is keen to show it is still relevant.
To help launch their latest model, the Raleigh One St (Step Through), they turned to London-based independent creative agency HarrimanSteel to deliver a campaign that highlights the simple joys of cycling through everyday moments.
HarrimanSteel’s brief was to position Raleigh as a culture-first leader in the urban e-bike category, who do more than simply get people from A to B. The agency’s response was to lean into humour and optimism, celebrating life’s small pleasures – green lights on your way to work, feeling the wind in your hair – in a context that it hopes will resonate with the next generation of easy riders.
Titled Reasons to be Cheerful, the campaign is rooted in an “irreverent, quirky and playful tone of voice” that gives the brand’s core proposition a light-hearted twist, “from riding with friends to a service plan that means you can sleep easy at night,” say HarrimanSteel. The subsequent campaign line ‘one more reason to be cheerful’ appears throughout the creative, which portrays carefree Raleigh owners in a variety of urban environments.
A suite of six-second social films, shot by Tobias May, are buoyed by the familiar ‘tring, tring’ of a bell and other bike sounds, while key visuals, photographed by Miriam Strong, feature checklists of reasons to be cheerful, mixing technical aspects of the One St with the supposed perks of riding it. Some are a little on the nose (‘just vibing’), but overall they strike a good balance between spotlighting the product benefits and attempting to appeal to Raleigh’s target audience.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of HarrimanSteel’s approach, however, is the fact that they cast a real group of friends to be the campaign’s protagonists. According to the agency, none of them had modelled before, and as such there is a palpable sense of authenticity across the visuals.