Chad Waetzig, the chief marketing officer of Crunch Fitness, recently sat down with Rachel Zabonick-Chonko, the editor-in-chief of Club Solutions Magazine, to discuss new year marketing trends. They discuss playful marketing, how to break through the media clutter, the use of AI in marketing and more.
Below is a partial transcript, edited for clarity:
Rachel Zabonick-Chonko: I’m really excited to talk to you because the new year is a great time for marketing inspiration. I wanted to start off with a question surrounding playful marketing. I’m just curious if you have any thoughts on if that’s something that’s getting people back into gyms in the new year?
Chad Waetzig: Certainly, it’s an approach we take at Crunch and is something we think is very important to our marketing strategy. I think you can simply start by looking at what’s going on in the world of social media, between TikTok and Instagram. People are looking for content that is fun and engaging and playful, as you put it. And we think, for us to stand out and break through the clutter — we think our advertising needs to play in that same. It has to be engaging, it has to be fun, sometimes humorous and playful. And in many respects, we’ve taken some deep consumer insights we know about fitness, the industry and the consumer, and have turned that into a creative platform, which we call “feel good, not bad,” that really embraces this idea of fun in a way that breaks through the clutter.
RZ: Do you have any other examples of that in practice?
CW: I have to give a lot of credit to both are our head of social media at Crunch, but also to our Crunch franchise partners. They’ve done a fantastic job with their organic social media to create a fun and playful community. And I think that really speaks to the Crunch culture. We’ve always been the original no judgments gym. But what that ladders up to for us at Crunch is about making serious fitness fun. And we think that fun comes through not only in our great group fitness classes, in the environment we create in terms of the lighting and the music and all the vibes you get in in our gyms in particular, but it comes through in all of our touch points. I think social media for us is one of those.
RZ: I think that’s a really great strategy too. Because fitness isn’t always fun for people.
CW: It’s one of the one of the great things about fitness is that you get out, as a consumer, what you put into it. And one of the things we know, both across the industry but also at Crunch, is that the motivation to work out, both to get started and to maintain the motivation to workout, is really hard. And so if we can make that experience fun — the workout itself might be hard. But if we can make that experience fun, and that feeling that you get right, that rush of endorphins, that sense of accomplishment, the release of stress and anxiety that comes from working out — all those things ladder up to feeling good. And ultimately, that’s what we think fitness is about, it’s about feeling good.
Watch the full Q&A for more insights from Waetzig on new year marketing trends.
