Weightlifting Gym

The nation’s citizens were more health-conscious than ever but were still becoming less healthy across six wellness dimensions. The problem is not that there were too many gyms, it was that there are too few effective gyms. We knew the main barriers for people getting fitter. The best competitors have built concepts to solve them. Taking a clear position was the primary growth task, grounded by realities that included a harder to sell proposition, more niche customer appeal, relatively high cost and low walk-in volume.

The benefits people seek from fitness regimes were often based on unsustainable or unhealthy lifestyle choices and bad advice from ‘experts’. When they inevitably fall off the wagon they face a needlessly long and slow climb to get back up. That is not what the gym was about. This gym was about results for life. The strength of teamship amongst a small but dedicated team of trainers, was the superpower that needed to be released, by assigning each trainer to a clear, different, yet complementary purpose and audience.

Gym-goers want personalised functional, emotional and aspirational outcomes from their fitness journey. Since the gym’s core strength wasn’t easy to sell, we reframed it. The process became the fun part. We defined three core customer segments - enthusiasts that were frustrated with the standard gym experience - and aligned them to core expertise services. The brand was inspired by tattoo culture. Instead of making this softer, we reframed that too.  We added a new hook that the gym “takes the fear factor out of fitness”.

We designed a playbook of tactics to increase awareness, onboarding and engagement that each trainer could adopt and contribute to. The brand playbook helped guide the team to achieve a 78% increase trial members converting to a class, a 54% increase in evening class attendance and a 100% increase in occupancy over a 6 month period.