Creating a unified brand experience in your fitness or wellness studio

‍Fitness and wellness studios that execute a unified brand experience throughout the customer journey have a commanding advantage in the modern wellness industry.

The appeal of a carefully-crafted fitness and wellness studio experience is undeniable – after all, being a patron of one of these studios is as much about the atmosphere and experience as it is about the classes themselves, if not more!

In this blog post, I'd like to explain what a unified brand experience is all about, and offer some tips and tricks to help you leverage this powerful strategic principle in your own fitness or wellness studio.

Understanding the basics of a unified brand experience

A unified brand experience is all about providing a consistent experience to your clients throughout every ‘touchpoint’ (or point of interaction) that your client has with your studio, and ensuring that this experience aligns with your brand’s purpose, values and character.

A unified brand experience is a well-documented marketing strategy technique that can be effectively implemented into fitness and wellness studios of any size – the smaller the studio, the easier it is to implement.

To properly execute a unified brand experience, all internal team members should have a clear and intimate understanding of what your brand stands for, what values it espouses, and how they can behave or communicate in a practical sense in order to embody these qualities.

The power of a unified brand experience in the fitness and wellness space

Crafting a unified brand experience is an important aspect of any small business' brand and marketing strategy, but here are three reasons why this technique is particularly important for fitness and wellness studios:

1. A unified brand experience allows studios to confidently make bold and engaging studio-wide value propositions (or promises of value) in their marketing communication and advertising media, detailing uniquely valuable aspects of their services with the assurance that the internal team will back up those promises with real-world behaviours across all facets of the studio. Over time this builds trust, loyalty and a sense of community.
2. A unified brand experience allows studios to offer greater consistency of in-class experience across a variety of class types and instructor styles, avoiding a common scenario where each instructor's own personal style makes each class feel like a completely separate and un-related experience, which is damaging to the studio's sense of purpose and place, and the overall brand experience.
3. A well-planned and unified brand experience creates a signature studio vibe, feel, ambience and sense of character, that can be felt the moment one walks through the door, encouraging creative on-brand solutions to common desires or problems faced by the brand's target audience, and emphasising the studio’s individuality in an interactive and engaging way.

How studios can become misaligned in their experience delivery

In the beginning, most studio founders start off with a firm understanding of their purpose, and a novel idea for a unique point of difference to help them do things a 'little differently' to other studios already servicing the community.

In these early moments of inspiration, the foundations of a strong, character-based brand experience are powerfully present, but often along the way, sometimes as a result of expansion or diversification of the internal team, the real-world experience of interacting with the studio and participating in classes can become a little misaligned with the founders' vision.

Where this is the case, disparity occurs between the studio's core brand principles, the ensuing promises made through its marketing and advertising media channels, and the actual experience of interacting with the studio itself as a client – needless to say, this isn't great for your customer satisfaction levels!

To avoid this, fitness and wellness studios, just like any other business, can place their brand's purpose, values and character at the heart of their day-to-day operations, translating their foundational brand concepts into purposeful actions and behaviours that deliver a uniquely appealing customer experience.

Fitness and wellness studios in particular, more so than many other business types, are uniquely placed to leverage the creation of a unified brand experience, due to the highly experiential nature of their services. There are usually no shortage of opportunities to create a truly bespoke and unified brand experience within your studio's walls and class spaces, and doing so can make all the difference in converting casual clients into loyal (and often long-term) brand advocates in the process.

Tips for creating and maintaining a unified brand experience in-studio

1. Clarify and share your brand purpose and values ‍

One of the most common causes of a 'watered-down' brand experience in-studio is the internal team's lack of clarity around the core principles of the brand they represent.

To avoid this, you can take steps to ensure maximum clarity around what it is that your brand stands for, what values it holds dear, what brand characteristics you wish to align with, and how your team will manifest these characteristics in real-world behaviours during daily studio life.

To begin, record a brand purpose statement – in writing – in a single sentence if possible, and work with your team to select around four or five personal values that align closely with this purpose to adopt as your brand values.

Then, take things a step further by selecting around seven or eight personality characteristics to adopt as your brand characteristics (for example, my own brand characteristics here at Healthy Designs are simple, clear, engaging, smart, warm, friendly, personal and gentle), ensuring that these align completely with your brand purpose statement and brand values.

Your brand purpose, brand values and brand characteristics combine to form your core brand principles, and should resonate with your internal team on a personal level as much as possible.

Keep in mind that building a brand, while being a wonderful exercise in team alignment and motivation generation, is primarily a strategic marketing technique, and so like every other marketing technique, it's highly important that your core brand principles resonate strongly with your primary target audience, and your intended point of difference as a service provider.  

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2. Reference your core brand principles regularly

Aim to make your brand purpose, values and character central to your internal team’s meetings and discussions, and be guided by them when planning events, holding workshops, crafting marketing materials, making changes to internal processes, and making important decisions for your studio moving forward.

Maintaining a unified brand experience within your studio is a team effort, and requires an open and omnidirectional flow of communication between your internal team members and studio managers.

Every team member, regardless of hierarchical position, should be encouraged to share their perspective on how the brand is doing in terms of alignment of the customer experience to core brand principles, and it's generally a best practice to allow each team member to take ownership of adjusting the customer experience for maximum brand alignment at the touch points they know best, where appropriate.

This open flow of communication may also help to facilitate necessary adjustments to the brand's core principles over time, in order to keep pace with changing consumer interests and needs, and changes in the internal team's structure.

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3. Map and assess your touchpoints regularly

Touchpoint mapping involves listing out your studio's touchpoints one-by-one, and examining the extent to which the customer experience at each touchpoint aligns with your brand purpose, values and character.

This may sound difficult and laborious, but it can be a wonderful exercise in customer experience awareness to carry out as a team as you increase your collective understanding of what it’s like to step into the shoes of one of your customers during interactions with your studio.

You might find it helpful to work with one or more of your most trusted clients to get feedback on their experience at particular touchpoints along the journey, and you can even have someone from your internal team become a client for a day to have them experience several touchpoints first-hand.

Just keep in mind with this exercise that individual personal experiences can be subjective, so seek out multiple sources of feedback from members of your target audience before making any important changes to your studio and its processes that you're unsure about.

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4. Be a mindful custodian of your internal brand culture

Being a custodian of your internal brand culture begins with being highly protective and nurturing of your existing team – so as to reduce staff turnover as much as possible – and empowering them to play important roles in creating and shaping the brand experience. The aim is for the entire team to feel a strong sense of belonging and personal responsibility in contributing to the energetic movement that is the studio's brand.

When new hires are necessary, the idea is to carefully select new team members whose personal values and characteristics align with your brand's core principles, because unlike skills and experience that accrue with training over time, personal values and characteristics can’t be taught, and tend to be static in nature. This is applicable for all roles within your studio, from class instructors to management hires.

A candidate possessing ‘on-brand’ personal values and characteristics will be willing and capable of delivering an on-brand experience to your clients with less training and preparation, and in a way that is more authentic, than candidates who don't. This greatly increases your ability to maintain a unified brand experience during staffing changes in your studio.

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Conclusion

It feels wonderful to step into a fitness and wellness studio with a vibrantly unified brand experience.

You can sense the intention and purpose contained within the walls the moment you walk through the door, and you’re reminded of it again and again in a variety of ways as you progress step-by-step through the customer journey.

You’ll often notice a unique style and purposefulness in the way the internal team interact with you. There may be a sense of community, of camaraderie, of shared interest, of newness mixed with familiarity...

These experiential qualities are all hallmarks of a unified brand experience in full flight, and it can feel energising, and sometimes serenely uplifting, to be a patron of a fitness or wellness studio like this.

But if this isn’t the experience your studio delivers yet, that’s totally okay.

Whether you're part of the way there, or just getting started, I hope this post has helped you to understand the importance of working on your studio's brand delivery – from core principles through to the all-important client experience – and provided some guidance on how you can take the next step toward a more unified brand experience within your studio.

I'd love to hear more about your personal experiences around the creation of a unified brand experience within your studio, as well as any feedback you might have on this blog post (which helps me to improve my future articles), so please don't hesitate to reach out and send me an email here.