The sporting goods industry has a problem. It’s not market saturation, supply chain disruption, or loyalty. It’s this: The entire sector is still designing for people who already move.
According to McKinsey’s 2025 report, 1.8 billion people globally are inactive. Eighty-one percent of youth don’t meet the minimum recommended levels of physical activity. And the trendline is getting worse.
If that many people are opting out, something’s broken. And it’s not just the healthcare system, it’s the way we’re telling the story of who movement is for.
The Industry Misread the Market
For decades, sporting goods brands have built their strategy around performance—faster shoes, lighter fabrics, high-intensity everything.
But here’s the truth: most people aren’t asking for better performance.
They’re asking for permission. To move a little. To show up imperfectly. To not feel like fitness requires a costume change and a complete identity overhaul.
The industry has spent years glamorizing peak performance and calling it motivation.
For most people, it feels like exclusion.
And when you ignore the majority of your potential customers—not because they’re not interested, but because your messaging tells them they don’t belong—you’re not just missing a niche.
What Target Buyers Actually Need
Most people don’t want to “train.” They want to feel better. They want to move without feeling judged. They want to participate without changing their identity.
But the dominant industry message has been: move like an athlete, or don’t bother.
That’s the missed opportunity.
The 2022 Mintel Healthy Lifestyles report backs this up: people aren’t chasing six-packs—they’re trying to manage stress, boost their mood, and feel more in control of their health. Exercise isn’t just about fitness anymore. It’s about functioning.
Why are brands still marketing physical activity as if it’s only for people who treat it like a competition or high-performance sport?
Most buyers aren’t looking to transform. They’re looking for something sustainable. Familiar. Doable. Brands that get that—and reflect it in their messaging and product design—are building trust with the majority that’s been ignored.
A Few Brands Are Paying Attention
Outdoor Voices reframed exercise with its “Doing Things” ethos—inviting people to reimagine movement as play, not punishment.
ASICS shifted the narrative toward mental health, releasing campaigns focused on the emotional payoff of simply moving.
Saucony’s “Marathumb” challenge gamified scroll time into run distance—translating digital behavior into physical engagement.
“This Girl Can” by Sport England remains one of the strongest examples of a movement-first, identity-inclusive campaign.
These aren’t marketing stunts. They’re strategic shifts. They lower the barrier to entry—and they’re winning attention in the right places.
What McKinsey Gets Right—and What It Misses
McKinsey’s report frames the inactivity epidemic as a growth lever, and it’s correct. But it glosses over how brands should actually show up in that space.
What’s missing:
Real segmentation. “Inactive” isn’t one audience.
Emotional insight. What gets someone to move for the first time isn’t the same as what keeps them moving.
Positioning strategy. You can’t market to the unengaged the same way you market to performance loyalists.
A modern GTM approach. Not just new products, but new behaviors, new cultural hooks, new ways of measuring success.
The Growth Story No One’s Writing
My two cents (because that’s what blogs are, I guess): The next wave of growth in sporting goods won’t come from more performance innovation.
It will come from brands that stop designing for the 20% who already live in workout gear, and start figuring out how to make the other 80% feel like they belong. Because if your go-to-market strategy still assumes your customer is already active, you’re not growing. You’re just swapping market share with your competitors.
These aren’t edge cases. They’re the majority. And they’re not asking for motivation. They’re asking for a reason to feel like they belong.
Brands that understand this—who make it easier to start and stop treating effort like it has to be extreme—aren’t just chasing a new customer. They’re building long-term relevance and actually expanding who fitness is for.
