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Which is ironic when you consider that this Nottingham-based company built its name and reputation not so much with fancy ads (until recently it was never a big advertiser), but with product innovation and solid engineering virtues that made it second only to Rolls-Royce as a West Midlands apprenticeship.

But marketing has certainly played its part. As early as 1892, four years after it was founded, a poster was boasting that Raleigh was 'Champion of the World' off the back of its success in the Tour de France and a host of other races. And it was success on the track and on the road that bred the reputation of Raleigh and in which it invested most of its spend.

With Raleigh's Reg Harris winning the World Professional Sprint Championships for four years in the heyday of the sport after the Second World War, Raleigh's name has been synonymous with racing success ever since. In the 1960s and 1970s, Team Raleigh switched its attention to the European road racing scene, culminating in victory at the Tour de France in 1980.

It's a sign of the success of its sponsorship programmes that when Chris Boardman won Olympic gold on a weird-looking bike in 1992, everyone assumed it was a Raleigh. It was actually a Lotus.

Meanwhile, as road racing began to wane (especially in the UK), Raleigh had switched to sponsoring the top mountain biking team, until it disbanded last year. Today, Raleigh has changed its focus to support grassroots initiatives with the British Cycling Federation in a bid to find the potential champions of the future.

Undoubtedly the most important marketing key for Raleigh has been product development. The most famous bike of all was the Chopper, a cultural icon of the 1970s that was inspired by the Harley Davidsons in the road movie Easy Rider, and which received oodles of free publicity. But from the Grifter to the Activator and the M-trax, Raleigh was for many years at the forefront of every cycling craze.

Of course, advertising and promotion has played its part. Until two years ago, Raleigh worked for many years with local Notts agency Cross Hill Conwill on some inspired campaigns. One memorable TV series featured a raven and, in one treatment, showed a bike skiing down the mountain carving through the snow like a snowboarder. In the early 1990s, Lenny Henry's voice was used for a cartoon-based character based on the Raleigh emblem's heron to promote children's bikes. Also successful was a print-based campaign series that included a witty ad featuring the Cerne Abbas chalk giant, who sports an enormous erection, retouched so that he's holding a bicycle; and a Gainsborough portrait of a woman with a bike lazily retouched into the rural hedge behind her. More recent billboard advertising has been rather less successful than these.

Today, Raleigh is at a crossroads - and in more senses than one. It faces more competition as rivals such as Trek and Marin have become more trendy. The company has also suffered from underinvestment in recent years.

You could even argue that Raleigh has failed to take advantage of its branding riches: locked up in a vault of unused property rights are such brands as BSA, Humber, Robin Hood, Hercules and Carlton.

Raleigh has also recognised, however, that its role must change. With engineering excellence and assembly now sourced more cheaply in the Far East, the company is preparing to close its Nottingham plant after more than 100 years; this historic brand is therefore less concerned with pure product excellence (with production moving to the Far East) than with specifying visual design, colours, transfers, and the shape of bikes.

The challenge, as ever, is to find the next 'new thing' and to lead trends from the front. To do that, Raleigh is currently looking for an ad agency for the first time in two years - it plans to find a new PR agency too.The rebirth of Raleigh is only just beginning.

FACT FILE
1888: Sir Frank Bowden buys an interest in a Nottingham-based bicycle
manufacturer on Raleigh Road. It quickly establishes itself as an
international concern.
1892: Raleigh already leads the world in cycle racing. A poster boasts
of winning 2300 prizes in that year alone.
1970: The Chopper is launched and becomes a cultural phenomenon.
1997: Raleigh is sold to an American venture capital company.
2001: Alan Finden-Cross, who bought Raleigh from TI Industries and then
sold it, re-acquires it.
2002: Raleigh announces plans to cease production in Nottingham, moving
its manufacturing and assembly to the Far East.