Strategy lead for re-positioning a lifestyle brand in the competitive fitness category
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Business challenge:
A national fitness brand brought me in with Gestalt Brand Labs to help them make clarity out of chaos in their existing product architecture and naming systems. They had successfully introduced new classes and grown the business without an organizing principal but as they looked to grow their audience, they needed relevant narratives and positioning for their offering in order to more effectively market them. They needed a tighter, more compelling, more robust story to tell in order to bring people in and gain longterm loyalty.
My approach:
Research and key insights: Not everyone on the leadership team within the fitness brand was aligned around the renaming their classes. Getting them on the same page required surfacing data and insights that showed why inconsistent names and stories were hurting the overall brand, and what the market opportunity looked like if they made strategic changes.
Brand architecture and positioning: I demonstrated the potential to have four subbranded classes under the overarching brand umbrella, with individual positioning and narratives to tell a more rubust brand story.
Naming: Building off the new class positioning, I created a naming structure with recommended names that worked together and inspired fresh, compelling creative.
Creative Guidelines: With new names, we could creative opportunities, and how that might look within specific marketing assets to bring the new classes to life and create a roadmap for the brand’s internal creative teams to execute in market.
Key learnings:
Although it’s preferable to reimagine a master brand and then adjust product positioning, in this project that wasn’t an option. There was too much existing investment and infrastructure (i.e. risk) in motion to do a brand overhaul even if leadership understood the potential. By focusing on product architecture, we armed product teams to tell more engaging stories about in market, while creating alignment and buy-in from stakeholders around a larger rebrand when the business is ready to take the leap. It was a small win, but laid the groundwork and served as a test-pilot for a bigger brand evolution.