On Running: How a Swiss Shoe Brand Built Mental Availability Fast

On Running was founded in Switzerland in 2010. By 2024, it reported CHF 2.32 billion in net sales, up 29.4% year over year, with a 60.6% gross margin. For context, that gross margin rivals some of the most profitable consumer brands on earth.

How does a running shoe brand with no legacy, no massive media budget, and no superstar heritage compete against Nike, Adidas, and ASICS in a $384 billion global sportswear market? The answer isn't a mystery, but most marketing breakdowns miss it. On's rise is a near-perfect demonstration of how mental availability and distinctive brand assets compound faster than advertising spend ever could.

The CloudTec Sole Did What Most Campaigns Can't

On's most important marketing decision wasn't a media buy. It was a product design choice: the CloudTec sole.

Those hollow rubber pods on the bottom of every On shoe are unmistakable. On the shelf, in a store window, or mid-stride on a city sidewalk, they signal the brand instantly. No logo required. This is exactly what Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute describes when she talks about distinctive brand assets: memory hooks that make a brand easier to recognize and recall in buying situations.

Byron Sharp and his colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have shown repeatedly that most brands in a category are functional look-alikes. Consumers don't carefully parse product attributes the way marketers imagine they do. What wins isn't being objectively better. It's being easier to notice and remember. The CloudTec sole solves both problems at once. It tells a performance story (the pods compress on impact) and it creates a visual shorthand that no competitor owns.

This is differentiation vs distinctiveness in the real world. On didn't win by arguing their shoes were objectively superior to Nike's. They won by making their shoes impossible to mistake for anyone else's.

In Never Always, Never Never, Patrick Gilbert walks through how Jenni Romaniuk's work on distinctive assets reframes the whole conversation about brand building. Distinctiveness isn't about proving you're better. It's about being easier to notice, recall, and recognize in the moments that matter. The CloudTec sole is one of the clearest product-level examples of this principle you'll find anywhere in consumer goods.

Category Entry Points: Who Is On Talking To?

Mental availability doesn't work in the abstract. It works through category entry points: the specific situations, needs, and moments that bring a product category to mind.

On's original beachhead was the performance runner. Serious runners who cared about cushioning technology and visual identity outside the legacy brands. That's a narrow category entry point, but it's a credible one. It gave On a foothold before they tried to be everything.

From there, On expanded into adjacent entry points: premium lifestyle, design-conscious fashion consumers, and the culture audience that follows high-profile athlete partnerships. Each expansion added new memory links without abandoning the original.

The Roger Federer partnership is the clearest example of this expansion strategy working. Federer doesn't just reach tennis fans. He reaches the aspirational, premium consumer who associates his name with excellence, taste, and longevity. Multiple sources describe a measurable "Federer effect" on the brand, with Federer-branded product lines becoming a standalone demand driver. He's a category entry points framework in human form: a trigger that brings On to mind for a consumer who might never have been searching for a running shoe.

The "Soft Wins" campaign with Elmo, reported by Marketing Dive, pushed into yet another entry point. Most running shoe advertising leans hard into intensity, performance metrics, and competitive drive. By pairing with Elmo and promoting a softer approach to running, On planted a flag in the "running doesn't have to be brutal" occasion. That's a real buying situation that the big incumbents had left unclaimed.

This is how mental availability marketing scales. Not by being everything to everyone from day one, but by systematically adding occasions and need states where your brand shows up first.

Premium Positioning Isn't Just Pricing. It's a Signal.

On has held its premium price positioning consistently. This matters more than it sounds.

Byron Sharp's research on brand salience makes clear that mental availability requires consistent signals over time. Every time On charges a premium and holds that line, it reinforces a memory structure: this brand is not competing on price. That signals something to the consumer's brain before they've read a single product description.

The 60.6% gross margin On reported for 2024 isn't just a financial outcome. It's evidence that the positioning is working. Consumers are choosing On at full price, repeatedly. That's the behavioral proof of mental availability: the brand comes to mind at the moment of purchase, and the consumer doesn't hesitate.

Selective distribution reinforces the same signal. On hasn't tried to be everywhere all at once. Their mix of direct-to-consumer (DTC revenue exceeded CHF 940 million in 2024, roughly 40% of total sales), selective wholesale, and owned retail and pop-up experiences gives them control over context. When you first encounter On, it's usually in an environment that says "this is a premium product." That context shapes the memory structure that forms.

Physical availability marketing isn't just about being in as many stores as possible. It's about being in the right places so that the brand's meaning isn't diluted by channel conflict. On has understood this better than most DTC-era brands, many of whom learned the hard way that distribution without context destroys positioning.

How On Launched Markets: Grassroots Before Mass

A detailed market-entry plan developed for On's Croatia launch offers a window into their tactical approach at the ground level. The plan didn't lead with mass advertising. It prioritized in-store merchandising, grassroots activities, paid social, PR, guerilla marketing, running event sponsorship, and a "Shoe Finder Machine" that brought the product experience directly to consumers.

The largest budget shares went to social media, guerilla marketing, and brand initiatives and trade events. Print and point-of-purchase displays anchored the advertising component. This isn't a media-heavy brand strategy. It's a community-first, product-experience-first approach designed to build credibility before scale.

This sequencing matters. One source describes On's approach as prioritizing organic spread instead of pouring money into advertising. That framing aligns with how mental availability actually builds: through repeated, contextually relevant exposure across multiple touchpoints, not through a single high-spend campaign.

It also maps cleanly to what Les Binet and Peter Field have documented about how brands grow over time. Short-term activation and long-term brand building aren't the same job, and confusing them is one of the most common and expensive marketing mistakes a brand can make. On's market entry strategy separates the two: establish the brand meaning first (grassroots, events, PR, product experience), then scale with paid channels once the memory structures exist to make those paid impressions meaningful.

We covered a related pattern in our analysis of how Airbnb cut marketing spend and still grew: brand investment that builds memory structures delivers compounding returns that performance spend alone never can.

The LightSpray Moment: Building Salience Through Spectacle

On's approach to product launches shows the same discipline.

The LightSpray and CloudBoom Strike LS launch was teased over an extended period, built toward a major moment at the Boston Marathon, and then carried visibility through the 2024 Olympics in Paris. This isn't a product launch. It's a memory-building sequence.

The Boston Marathon is one of the highest category entry points in running: the world's oldest annual marathon, with a self-selected audience of serious runners and performance enthusiasts. Showing up there with a genuinely novel product tied to a visible manufacturing story gives On earned media and credibility simultaneously. Paris 2024 extended that reach to a global audience watching elite sport.

None of this requires a traditional advertising budget. It requires product innovation tied to cultural moments that your target audience already cares about. The result is salience: the brand becomes harder to ignore in the exact contexts where running shoes are most top of mind.

This is what Patrick Gilbert covers in Never Always, Never Never when discussing how brands build memory structures across Category Entry Points. The job isn't to create fanatics. It's to make your brand easy to think of when someone enters the category. A Boston Marathon moment does that for a running brand more efficiently than almost any media buy could.

What On's Numbers Actually Tell Us

On's growth trajectory tells a clear story:

• 2023 net sales: CHF 1.79 billion, up 46.6% year over year
• 2024 net sales: CHF 2.32 billion, up 29.4% year over year
• H1 2024 revenue: CHF 1.076 billion, up 24% year over year
• 2024 gross margin: 60.6%
• 2024 DTC revenue: over CHF 940 million, approximately 40% of total sales

The strategy going forward is equally ambitious: double 2023 sales by 2026 and reach adjusted EBITDA above 18%.

These numbers don't confirm which specific campaign drove which increment of growth. The honest read of the available evidence is that campaign-level ROI data isn't public. What the numbers do confirm is that On has built a brand that commands premium pricing, holds strong margins, and converts across both DTC and wholesale channels simultaneously. That profile is the output of mental availability working at scale.

A brand that consumers can't recall at the point of purchase doesn't achieve 60.6% gross margins. A brand that hasn't built real memory structures doesn't convert 40% of its revenue through its own direct channels. On has done both.

The secondary claim that On reached approximately 12% U.S. retail share while Nike fell from 39% to 32% should be read cautiously since it isn't drawn from primary disclosures. But even as directional context, it reflects a category dynamic that the core data supports: On is taking share in a market where the incumbents are losing it.

The Distinctiveness Lesson

Most running shoe brands try to win on product specs. On wins on memory.

The CloudTec sole is a distinctive asset that works as a category entry point trigger, a point-of-sale recognition cue, and a conversation starter simultaneously. The Federer partnership ties the brand to a set of cultural associations (precision, longevity, premium taste) that no product feature could communicate on its own. The premium distribution strategy ensures that every touchpoint with the brand reinforces the same memory structure.

This is what building mental availability looks like when it works. Not a single clever campaign. A consistent set of signals, repeated across contexts and time, until the brand occupies a large share of the right people's minds in the right buying situations.

At AdVenture Media, we see this distinction play out constantly: brands that invest in distinctive assets and category entry points compound their returns over time, while brands that optimize purely for short-term conversion keep buying the same customer twice.

The lesson from On isn't that you need a Roger Federer or an Olympics moment. It's that you need a CloudTec: one thing that is unmistakably yours, that you repeat consistently, that earns space in memory before a consumer ever walks into a store. Once that asset exists and is reinforced across enough entry points, growth stops being a media spend problem and starts being an availability problem. And On has solved both.

For brands trying to build the same kind of compounding returns, the frameworks behind this thinking are covered in detail in Never Always, Never Never. The CloudTec sole didn't happen by accident. Neither does the brand around it.