As I described, we evolved to a winning formula, with direct response dominating our front-end or external marketing to the world at large and brand dominating our back-end or internal marketing to and through our members. It worked. But we were involved in a business’s evolutionary process, not an arrival at a fixed destination.
We established direct response to sell athlete memberships at each gym, building a growing number of tribes that each athlete member felt an allegiance to. This then allowed for the brand-centric marketing strategies to encourage them to feel prideful association with a brand that is much bigger than just themselves.
But one thing that we began to ask ourselves was how we could better leverage the brand that we’ve built, while still putting solid lead-generating direct-response marketing out there.
This is not easy.
The ad agency experiment (and my passion for the TV hit series Mad Men) had spurred ideas in my head of infusing a traditional brand-building strategy with direct-response fundamentals. However, it has not necessarily been an instant success, but it’s definitely been a valuable learning experience. But that’s the advantage of having your own corporate gyms to use as innovation test kitchens.
Our system is based on a “do as we do” foundation and NOT just telling our franchise partners to “do as we say.” It’s always frustrated Forrest and me to watch the consultants out there coaching people to do things they’ve never even had experience in, telling them to spend the money and time required without knowing whether that advice is going to work.
This next experiment started with a basic idea. I told myself that if Iron Tribe was going to be a household brand name, then I needed to make sure that we had our very own marketing tagline that our member athletes can cling to (i.e., Nike’s “Just Do It”), as well as a tagline that could be the source for all our social proof that would continue to be embedded within ALL types of marketing messages.
Dan Kennedy often talks about the breakthrough power of identifying and communicating what business you are really in and urges people to separate their deliverables from that real business.
When we looked at the testimonial emails that clients constantly sent our way on a daily basis, a consistent theme emerged that moves Iron Tribe way beyond just fitness into the most powerful thing that any business could sell: TRANSFORMATION.
Observing the most powerful brands out there, they’ve taken a commodity, good, or service, and translated it into a superior customer experience. Starbucks personifies this in their ability to take a four-cent cup o’ coffee and charge $4.00 for it. Their “third place atmosphere” (in addition to home and work) has generated an experience that customers simply have to have. In Kennedy Language, their coffee is just a deliverable. Their real business is providing that third place. In the evolution of our brand and our marketing, we decided that the gyms, the classes, the workouts, even the media were all deliverables. The real business we were in was transformation.
If you put this book down right now, travel to your closest Iron Tribe, and start talking to member athletes, I am confident you’ll consistently hear about their personal transformations, which have gone far beyond the physical fitness results they signed up for in the first place.
Instead, these transformations are filled with feel-good stories about improved marriages, fatherhoods, friendships, careers, and so many other tales of what I tagged as “LIFE. Changed.”
At Iron Tribe, we are continuously transforming lives, and the social proof of this lies inside these real stories of “LIFE. Changed.” that our direct-response formula has continuously leveraged to generate leads. Meanwhile, our brand-based marketing utilizes this social proof to build the allegiance that each member athlete has toward the Iron Tribe logo.
Don’t get confused. The experiments of incorporating “LIFE. Changed.” into our direct-response lead-generation marketing has not so much increased external prospect response as much as it’s “puffed up the chests” of our internal member athletes. It’s cost us time and money, with months of lower ROI success at the beginning, but in the end it’s expedited our brand-building aspirations.
We have learned several ways to cage this brand-centric marketing beast, which can truly be a blessing and a curse.
First, we tell our franchise owners that it’s only something to roll out after they’ve reached membership capacity at a minimum of one of the Iron Tribe gyms in their market, since they’ll have no member athletes to highlight or make proud of the advertising when they first open up.
You HAVE to HAVE clients before you ever think of marketing the brand. Earn your logo some respect! This applies, in my mind, to any and every business. It can be quick, but there is a sequential process required before you get to full-on, simultaneous use of brand with direct-response everywhere, all the time. If you are already there but struggling, you may need to stop, back up, go back to the beginning, and restart your business just as we started the first Iron Tribe and still start each new geographic area.
Second, you have to be willing to allot the cost of this message as something that will just pay for itself (i.e., at least a 100% ROI) versus a direct-response message that could return as much as 300%. You’re not doing it to directly build membership, but more as an initiative that will maintain it. However, when you revisit the stat of 1.3 referrals and more than one contract renewal per member athlete, it’s safe to tell yourself that this test has been an overall success. Similar benchmark statistics or numbers are needed in your business.
Change your goals a bit, and understand that while your black-and-white objective ROI goals are still important, you also need to gauge the subjective feelings of your clientele with these brand-centric campaigns. Having conversations with them and even running surveys are ways to quantify this aspect a bit further.
The neatest part of the campaign is the systematized capability to customize it to each respective member athlete’s story in a way each can have their very own “LIFE. Changed.” tale that lives not only in external advertising but also in our segmented prospect mail and email nurturing sequences. And, of course, these stories now have their own section in our online medias on the iPhone app and website.
One of my favorite stories is of a female member athlete named Erin, who came into our second-ever Iron Tribe gym as a cancer patient looking for more energy and confidence while deep in her battle with chemotherapy. During her initial year of athlete membership at Iron Tribe, Erin’s attitude was fearless in her eventual victory over cancer, which she tells in her “LIFE. Changed.” story entitled “LIFE. Conquered.” Each story has a customized “LIFE. Changed.” sub-tagline word, describing each personal transformation. (See Figure 8.1 on page 74.)
This has become a powerful testimonial portal that can be leveraged in all forms of online and offline media.
We’ve even built a customized prospect segmenting system that allows us to customize the types of mail and email content prospects receive, including which “LIFE. Changed.” stories they can read, watch, and connect to our brand even more because of the personal alignment they’ll feel with the story they’re reading. You can see it online at www.IronTribeFranchise.com/NoBS.
Externally, we’ve began to tell these stories of “LIFE. Changed.” in print and digital SEM medias, amongst others, and then utilize detailed calls to action allowing people to continue on to a specific URL where they can watch Erin tell an expanded version of her story. This allows us to track response and conversion, ensuring that this branded campaign still has direct-response quantification fundamentals embedded inside its DNA.
FIGURE 8.1: Iron Tribe “LIFE. Changed.” Ad
Figure 8.1: DAN KENNEDY’S COMMENT: This approach worked out by Jim for Iron Tribe is frankly fraught with peril but is just about the best you could do when merging and integrating and cross-breeding direct response with a brand message in external, public advertising. Breeding these two advertising disciplines is like porcupines breeding—they do it very carefully. You will see that they have removed the hard-core A or B direct-response offer (i.e., call for appointment now or download or ask for this free report now) with a softer, less urgent invitation to go see the testimonial’s story online—and there they return to specific offers. Candidly, this makes me nervous. But I congratulate them on stopping short of too far, of too much sacrifice. Just do not miss Jim’s point that this has to occur at the right time in a business’s development. It is essentially a luxury affordable only at a certain level of sales and profits.
While the lead-generation results of “LIFE. Changed.” are not as high as the pure direct-response content that we continue to pump out externally at an average of 300% or better, the pride factor established amongst our clients has been priceless.
A Different Kind of Lead Generation
Lead generation or prospect attraction by paid advertising is one thing, and has its own measurements and ROI. But there’s rarely a better customer than a referred customer. By accepting less impressive ROI from this brand-oriented campaign than other direct-response campaigns, we invested in a different kind of lead generation: referrals.
The pride factor became a referral tool that has taken our already sky-high referral rate to another level. It was actually a product of conversation on a private client day with Dan Kennedy, where we all had a realization that even though our clients are evangelists, they don’t really have a bible or tracts to hand out to their friends that they want to recruit to their local tribe.
Think about it. We do these high-intensity workouts and charge an average of more than $250.00 per month for membership in this tribe. So our clients’ average descriptions end up unintentionally sounding something like “Hey, you need to really consider joining Iron Tribe, where the workouts are so extremely difficult that I’m always sore, and it costs about $300.00 per month.”
Not such a good elevator pitch!
However, when we started putting the “LIFE. Changed.” stories in their hands, it eased the effort of getting their friends to come to one of our Bring-A-Friend Day events, where they can do a partner workout with their friend, and then sign ‘em up to join the tribe.
The private client meeting led us to provide our member athletes with better tools for referrals and better training for them to do so. Dan also made sure he emphasized the fact that we should “reward them for the behavior,” meaning that whether or not the referral they give us actually converts into a new member athlete, the referrer should be rewarded for trying in the first place.
And reward them with something outside of the brand, not free product or membership. This led us to providing referrers with VIP experiences such as dinners at the finest restaurants in town and gear from their favorite clothing brands.
The idea of equipping and training our member athletes to refer actually led to an entire box, engineered with an Apple-like look and feel and composed of “LIFE. Changed.” resources for them to give to their friends, free sample nutritional products for them to taste, free merchandise for them to wear in their workouts, a protein shaker bottle, bumper stickers, and a even a blank slate for them to begin writing their “LIFE. Changed.” story as well.
Of course, all of these things are branded with our colors, logos, and overall look, knowing that we are literally teaching our clients from Day One to help us grow the tribe.
You can watch a video simulation of receiving an Iron Tribe welcome kit by visiting www.IronTribeFranchise.com/NoBS.
Dan likes to refer to these strategies, and the referral results that come with them, as having created a “cult following.” But as Forrest mentioned earlier, we prefer to use the word “tribe,” as it fits so perfectly within the context of our name and what we really are.
Just recently, the ultimate branding validation occurred when one of our franchisees had the Iron Tribe logo tattooed on his shoulder. (See Figure 8.2 on page 78.)
When we saw his picture posted and spread all over Facebook, I looked at Forrest and said, “I think it’s safe to say that this branding ROI is the equivalent to our 300% direct-response ROI!”
Go to www.IronTribeFranchise.com/NoBS to watch Jim Cavale and Forrest Walden provide commentary on this chapter and see real Iron Tribe marketing samples as well as a special presentation of their referral-generating welcome kit.
FIGURE 8.2: Iron Tribe Logo Tattoo
