Sports
Running Creators: Why Authenticity Beats Aesthetic Feeds
Karina Barcellos explains how sportswear brands evaluate real engagement and community value beyond picture-perfect feeds.
Discover how athletic brands evaluate running content creators. Karina Barcellos highlights why genuine community engagement matters far more than polished, hyper-curated profiles.
The rapid growth of the running community on social media has brought a flood of content creators, new formats, and aesthetic trends. In an increasingly competitive landscape, the race for sportswear brand sponsorships raises a recurring question: what truly defines a profile's value beyond follower count?
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Community strength over curated snapshots
Drawing on extensive experience at sportswear giants like Centauro and ASICS, Karina Barcellos points out that brand evaluations go far beyond feed aesthetics. Because social media only reveals edited snapshots of reality, brand analysis primarily focuses on how the audience interacts with the creator.
The decisive benchmark for a brand isn't a calculated pose, but the quality of comments, the level of genuine engagement, and how the community reacts to posts. Rather than merely evaluating content aesthetics, brands seek to understand whether interactions feel real or are just automated responses to curated personas built solely to attract sponsors.
Saturated clean aesthetics and the rise of real life
Visual standardization on social media—marked by overly clean, sanitized productions—has led to audience fatigue across the sports market. According to Barcellos, people are growing tired of artificial perfection, making room for a greater appreciation of everyday runners and authentic training routines.
This shift away from aesthetic perfection is reflected in both marketing strategies and relationship building. A notable practice is including everyday runners in brand events and activations—people with smaller followings of one to two thousand followers, yet deeply engaged and actively pounding the pavement.
Showing the fatigue of training, work routines, daily commutes, and unvarnished reality acts as a powerful catalyst for connection. For Barcellos, collective cultural change starts with individual content, swapping meticulously rehearsed posts for the genuine reality of the running journey.
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