Speaker unverified: belief

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…Normally, we talk about seven powers as we drift into analysis here. You're a Berkshire business, so we're going to talk about moats. What is Brooks' moat and how do you think about defending the castle now that you have what you've built? We think a lot about it. I think there's also something I'd add to that. Part of the moat can be business models. Business models can be really powerful. One of the things you can do as a company to create defensive moat structures is business model execution at scale. We now are executing retail partnerships with the best retailers for running gear to runners at Super Jock 'N Jill in Seattle, Fleet Feet running down in (I think) Menlo Park. Obviously, some of the better sporting goods players and outdoor from REI to Dick's Sporting Goods, we're their number one brand. We've earned that over 20 years and we have deep, broad partnership programs with them. Digital marketing, consumer journey, runners are digitally savvy. They're obviously all over the web. They start their shopping experience there. We reach them in active evaluation mode. Once you start looking at shoes, if you don't see our ad, I don't know how we missed you. We're spending a lot of money at runners now, maybe more money at people who run in active evaluation for running shoes than any other brand. Very focused. That's not easy to do in our industry at scale. I would say this is our moat. I think runnability, fit, feel, and ride, there's a lot of good shoes out there. It's actually not easy to make a great shoe. Anthony Fauci made a joke about shoes. "Vaccines are tough, they're complicated. It's not like making shoes." We get a lot of that. The refinement that goes into mile and making mile 26 acceptable, is really big. I think great product is not as common as you might think. The people on the inside, the frequent learners know. I think you always got to lead with product. That's the first brand experience, product experience. I think we do some hard things. We build a great product consistently, year in year out. It fits and it rides well. Then what we do on the retail side, partnering, activating in real life, running and selling shoes in real life events, and all the like, we do that better than anybody else. We service them. We deliver on time, complete. The digital piece, we're excited about it. We're still just getting started there, but we're really focused on it. I'm curious. I hadn't even thought about Strava and the amount of data that you're able to see from that. What does the digital side of running in the future look like for Brooks and for the industry?…

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