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- [00:00]
Peter Vs Bond
Hey, it's PVSB with the CPG Guys. You know, we talk a lot about this on the show. For CPG marketers today, it's not just about reaching consumers. It's about connecting with them meaningfully at every touch point. Here's the reality. Shopping isn't just an event anymore. It's woven into daily life. And with consumers spending over 90 minutes streaming content, daily entertainment has become central to the shopping journey. Amazon ads unifies commerce, entertainment and open Internet to reach 86% of US households, turning trillions of consumer signals into powerful results both on and beyond Amazon. So visit advertising.Amazon.com to learn more.
- [00:50]
Justin Bajan
Hi, I'm Justin Bajan, co founder of agency Familiar Creatures.
- [00:54]
Chad Waitzig
And hi, I'm Chad Waitzig, the CMO of Crunch Fitness and you're listening to the CPG Guys Podcast.
- [01:02]
Peter Vs Bond
Welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. Your host, Shree Rajagopalan and Peter Vs Bond explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in an increasingly digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys.
- [01:21]
Shree Rajagopalan
Hello and welcome to this episode of the CPG Guys. I'm of course Sri, your co host and also CRO and co founder of ThinkBlue Consulting, your trusted partner in your omnichannel development journey. You can get in touch with me at shreenkblueconsulting co. Not c o m co. Please do listen to my older daughter's music at www.rearaj.com and follow laraj. My younger daughter is a member of the world's fastest growing global girls group, Cat's Eye, who are now nominated at the time of this recording in a debut year for not one but two VMAs this weekend. So by the time this episode's out, we'll know whether they want any or not. So I'm excited. Looking forward to that. Do follow the stories of the industry changing epic Gap ad that the CMO and I were able to chat about that's actually made a national spotlight. Unable to join me today is my co host and my co founder pvsp, who also moonlights as head of industry and client engagement at Flywheel, the commerce acceleration division of omnicomp. Before we get to a podcast, let me request from our audience as always to follow us on your preferred podcast platform, Apple, Spotify, whatever it is. So you automatically receive the latest episodes. And please also consider giving us a rating so that our podcast becomes more findable by industry contemporaries looking to be educated and entertained. And we also know how we're doing. Do we have the right guests, the right conversations. And now for our main event. So our guest today continued on a new theme. We launched at the Cannes Lions Festival with about five unique episodes this year. Back in June, we bring back again one more time a CMO and the creative agency leader that they work with to understand how the world of the best creative, captivating consumer content is produced that drives brand equity. I'm not going to lie, I'm going to admit the Gap Cat's Eye brand has inspired me to really get down the creative path and hopefully we'll be putting out a bunch more episodes with CMOs and their creative partners. So let me introduce our guest today. Justin Bajan is co founder and Creative Director at Virginia based agency Familiar Creatures. Justin started Familiar creatures back in 2018 with former Martin Agency colleague Dustin Arts. Since opening the doors, the agency has given Challenger brands like Duke's Mayonnaise and Crunch Fitness the strategy and creative they need to gain consistent attention, convert customers and achieve meaningful business results. Needless to say, a lot of my conversation today with Justin is going to revolve around supporting Challenger brands and how the David and Goliath competition actually takes place. Chad Waitsig, on the other hand, serves as Crunch Fitness's Chief Marketing Officer and leads the brand's marketing and communications efforts for all locations globally, focusing on strategically growing the company's brand presence and member base while driving marketing, innovation and brand loyalty. Chad has also had previously senior marketing roles at Elizabeth Arden, Red Doorspas, which I'm very familiar with from my past days at Revlon, Blink Fitness, Wade, Disney Parks and Resorts, Starwood Hotels and Resorts and Marriott International. I would have loved to start discussing with him about true weightlifting. As you all know, through my TikTok and Instagram accounts, I'm now a true dedicated resistance trainer. But please join Peter and me in welcoming to the podcast Justin and Chad. Gentlemen, welcome to the CPG guys. How you both doing?
- [04:29]
Chad Waitzig
Good.
- [04:30]
Justin Bajan
Nice to be here.
- [04:31]
Chad Waitzig
Great. Thank you for having us.
- [04:33]
Shree Rajagopalan
We're incredibly happy to have you both on this episode. We'll mention to audience that the digital show notes of this episode will contain links to chad and Justin's LinkedIn profiles and their respective companies corporate pages so that you can multitask as we go on with the conversation. So I'm going to get started. Justin, I'm going to ask you first. You went from career dedicated to copywriting to launching familiar creatures in 2018. What was that pivotal moment that calling that kind of. You knew, hey, I'm going to do this. I'm going to become an entrepreneur and we get into creative full time for a living and then the industry recognizes you as an expert who partners with challenger brands competing with the behemoths. Talk to us about the value proposition that you do bring to challenger brands. You know what, I want to revise the word. I'm not going to say challenger brands. I'm going to say brands that actually are competing these days, thanks to digital and teaching the old legacy brands that there's room for everybody and that they should be paying attention.
- [05:31]
Justin Bajan
So the pivotal moment was really simple. It was my co founder, Dustin, he was working on a craft beer brand that got acquired by Anheuser Busch and he just said, I think they are going to need some advertising. Would you like to start an agency to work on a beer account? That sounded pretty great to me. So left Boston, Massachusetts, moved back to Richmond, which is where I was previously, and we started Familiar Creatures and we quickly opened it up beyond beer to challenger brands to brands that are outspent by the market leaders. And then your second question about our VAL prop, that's something we developed over time. We say we outsmart brand behemoths, meaning those market leaders that are just, just monsters. So for Duke's Mayonnaise, it's Hellman's who's backed by Unilever. For Crunch, it's Planet Fitness, which has infinitely more locations, infinite more marketing dollars, more equity and share voice. But we think Crunch is awesome. They're a passion brand. They, they started out as a cult brand. And so we work with brands like Crunch to give them kind of like they would expect working with a big agency but with non traditional ideas. So it's not going to be a playbook approach. It's going to be bespoke, custom and get them to sort of punch above their weight, so to speak.
- [07:02]
Shree Rajagopalan
All right, so you know, I did, I did just mention that I'm into resistance training big time now. I encourage everyone find your me time. For me, me time is spending 45 minutes four times a week doing resistance training with weights, keeping that as a backdrop. Now Chad, your career actually spans from PNG to hotel hospitality to Disney before Crunch. How have those diverse experiences in brand marketing and developing brand equity informed your leadership and innovation as CMO at Crunch?
- [07:34]
Chad Waitzig
Yeah, that's a really good question. I, first of all, I consider myself incredibly fortunate that I, I've been able to work on some of the best brands and the best, the best brand companies in the world. And I, I steal and take everything I can from each of those, each of those Places, I think. I think working in cpg, you learn really strong marketing fundamentals. And P and G, you know, it's one of the top companies in the world to do that. And so I brought that with me my whole career. I think what hospitality gives you is a really deep understanding that everything speaks right. It's not only the advertising and the promotion plan and the copy strategy, but it's the design of the hotel itself. It's the team, the associates in the hotel. Oftentimes, the brand grows from the inside out. And it's delivered by housekeepers making minimum wage, somebody at the front desk who is working late at night. And so pulling together a brand story that encompasses all of that and tells that story in an authentic, meaningful way, I think is what I. What I drew from that. And then entertainment, which with Disney, it's kind of a hybrid of some of those things, right? Because you do sell merchandise. You've got a box office, you've got to drive the turnstiles, you've got food and beverage, you've got hospitality, you've got lodging. And so the importance, I think, for Disney is the role of making sure that your consumer's having fun. That's ultimately what Disney's about. It's about that deep experience. And when you pull all those together. And certainly my time at Red Door Spa was important. You know, think of it. I worked in beauty care when I was at P and G on CoverGirl cosmetics and Max Factor Cosmetics. And so Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spa is an extension of beauty care, but it's also the building on. Of wellness. And so when I take all of those experiences together and I look at Crunch, and at the time, you know, Crunch was a cult brand. Crunch was around for 20 years before it really started to grow, but had tremendous passion behind it and people that absolutely loved the brand. And sit back to this day, I run into people all the time. That said, in fact, I was just speaking with somebody who is actually quite famous, who I will not mention on this podcast, but a public figure who said, man, I worked out at the Crunch on the Lower west side in 2008, and, man, I love that place. I still think about it all the time. So I got this opportunity to come work for this brand that was really about to take off on a growth trajectory. And I bring the classical marketing training, the importance that everything speaks, that you've got to curate the entire experience, and we're all about fun. So how do you bring those principles from entertainment? Those were the things that for me were important to the role and what I thought I could bring.
- [10:41]
Shree Rajagopalan
You know, you stoked a little bit of an emotion in me. Now today, something I'm going to do. Today I'm staying here to Marriott in downtown Denver for a client on the consulting hat that I wear and usually I just take for granted when I walk into the room, I check in. It's just a seamless experience. Don't pay too much attention to the decor, any of that stuff. But today I'm even going to look at that picture behind me in the room and for those of you that watch the video, you'll see that. And when I actually check out, I'm going to pay attention to how and where the sofas are placed, tables are placed, and even the restaurant where it's actually located and how the person that I interact with in the checkout interacts back with me. So that's something that's just going to now get memorized for life and pay attention.
- [11:30]
Chad Waitzig
Do they recognize you as a Marriott Bonvoy member? How long is checkout take? How long does check in take? Um, you know, we had a, we had a leader at Marriott when I was there and her point was anything longer than one person waiting is, is too long of a line.
- [11:48]
Shree Rajagopalan
You shouldn't have mentioned that because Justin and I now will demand that go forward at Marriott.
- [11:53]
Chad Waitzig
Right.
- [11:53]
Shree Rajagopalan
One person. Justin, what do you think?
- [11:55]
Chad Waitzig
I've worked there in 20 years, so I, I, you know, I don't, I don't take any, I love the brand. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a loyal, I'm a loyal Marriott consumer.
- [12:04]
Shree Rajagopalan
I've been a Marriott lifer at this point. So it's not going to change. But both of you, when you first started working together, Chad, I'm sure you were aware that Justin's whole expertise that the familiar creatures bring is for brands that also now want to scale and compete with larger brands. Scale being the key word over here. So what was the big idea inside that connected both of you? Your goals, your KPIs and objectives with familiar creatures creative vision to make it happen.
- [12:36]
Chad Waitzig
Yeah. So I'll take the first cut and then Justin will keep me honest and tell me all the things that I got wrong. But so we got introduced through one of our franchisees. So crunch today for the, really since 2010, we've, we've gone to market mostly as a franchise business and our franchisee that has The Richmond Tidewater Virginia market introduced us, I think it was right around 20, 20. 2020 or 2021, we were in the middle of the pandemic. So it was 20, 21 kind of coming out of the pandemic and one of the biggest challenges that we've had at Crunch. We've always been a brand that has leveraged irreverent humor, maybe a little sexual innuendo. We've always been a little bit edgy. That's always been part of our DNA. Part of the challenge that we've been faced with is how do you leverage humor in a smart, clever way to draw on consumer insights and to make the pitch for the benefit that we have. And the benefit of Crunch is emotional. It's not necessarily rational. The rational things, the Olympic lifting platforms, the selectorizers, the cardio equipment, those are all reasons to believe, but it's. And our culture is really what drives it. And we had had fits and starts, we'd had some successes, we'd had some failures in my tenure and certainly prior to my tenure up until the pandemic. And we were really looking for a partner that could help us kind of crack that code. And I think when you look at their focus on challenger brands and just their DNA and their history, working with some really great brands that have leveraged irreverent humor to tell a story, it felt like a really nice fit.
- [14:26]
Justin Bajan
Only thing I'll add on to that is that Chad saw the value in what we were doing. Like he had mentioned in our DNA. Me and my partner worked on Geico for several years and that was kind of one of the OG Challenger brands if you think about it. Going up against State Farm and Allstate as an experience that taught us how to get jokes that were over the plate as opposed to only being curve balls, ways that, that could capture the masses attention and as as opposed to just a few nerdy guys. So we brought that kind of big brand feel to our initial proposal to Crunch. Like this is what we can do for you and I think you guys deserve this kind of work. And Chad, Chad saw it right away. And that's just the dream that we can find a client that sees the value that we bring. We don't really have to persuade much, you know.
- [15:18]
Chad Waitzig
And the other thing I would add too, you know, at the time we, we were coming back out of the pandemic. So beginning about the middle of March 2020, for about four months, crunch was closed everywhere in the world. We began reopening in certain, in the US and certain states. After about that four month window, we still had markets that were closed or they had very, you know, tight restrictions around what you could do in a gym. Certain markets like Australia were still closed. Canada was still closed. So the other thing that we needed is we needed a way to reintroduce people back into the gym. We had to give them some comfort that gyms were safe. The irony of all of this is that there's plenty of data during the pandemic that said that gyms were actually a very safe place to be if you had proper social distancing. So we wanted to make sure all of those things came through. And in fact, they presented. They pitched two different concepts, and we ended up buying both because we thought they were both so good that we ended up stacking one after the other. We thought it actually told a nice story and helped reintroduce the brand and the fitness category back into the market.
- [16:28]
Shree Rajagopalan
That's what you kind of want to hear. I actually remember that time. One of the things I deeply regretted for the four months that we were locked indoors in Manhattan, March 2020 till about, let's say, July or August 2020, was I couldn't use the gym. And it was. It was actually quite sad. And it did open. I do remember using an app to book the one hour that I was able to go in. And for me, gym is me time. So it's a must do for me. And I'm a little bit of an obsessed person now. You know, I do isolation training, which actually fits in well with. The next question. Is the antithesis of who I am? Because I'm actually judgy on people who, you know, I've reclaimed the need for me to be fit again. I did lose my. I did lose my passion around going to the gym from about 2022 till about March of this year. But now I'm back, and I'm the guy that, hey, twice a week you got to train those biceps, the shoulders, the chest, and don't forget that all important back and leg day. But you guys have literally built this amazing campaign call, and it's in your. Everything that crunch stands for, no judgments. And that ethos, cordial, brand. And how do you both stand for that? And then how do you both bring that to life strategically and creatively in campaigns? Because getting people to come to the gym without any judgment and encouraging them, especially those that need to change their lives, is such a big win for the world in general.
- [17:54]
Chad Waitzig
Yeah, Justin, why don't I start and talk a little bit about the consumer insight and how we kind of address it in terms of the experience and Then maybe you can talk about how you. How you've. And the team have adapted that into our campaign work. So I would say crunch, our reason for being the way we go to market is based on two fundamental consumer insights. The first is that gyms are intimidating places, right? So let's start with that. And that's the one that most people like, get. Like I've heard people say, in fact, both of you and everyone listening have probably either said themselves or have heard people say, I can't join the gym yet. I've got to lose 10 pounds, right? So there's a body positivity challenge.
- [18:39]
Shree Rajagopalan
That was me in March 8th of this year before my fitness coach said to me and my nutritionist said to me, no one's going to care. You got to pay attention yourself. I felt I had to lose 30 pounds.
- [18:53]
Chad Waitzig
So 10 pounds, 30, everybody, like most people, say that the. The irony is that when you actually go to the gym and somebody who's there working to be a better version of themselves and they are working hard to lose weight, the others that are there really appreciate what they're doing, right? They admire that person, but the person doesn't. The individual doesn't recognize it. So that's the first. But here's the other part, that gyms are intimidating. If you've never been to the gym before and you walk in that door, you've got weights and plates and benches and racks and pulleys and pins and all kinds of cardio equipment. I don't know what that thing does, right? You see all this equipment and that, like, where do I even start? It can be overwhelming. And all I want to do is get in shape. Where do I even start, right? Which is why personal training is important. Getting off to a good start. So that's one insight. The second insight is that the motivation to work out is really hard, right? The most important decision you can make that day is to work out, to go to the gym. No one ever leaves the gym and says, gosh, I wish I hadn't done that. But a lot of people have said an hour after they could have gone, they're like, God, I wish I had gone to the gym. And then if you do go to the gym and you do the same workout over and over and over and over again, that routine can become boring and you lose the motivation to work out. And a lot of people drop out because they lose the motivation to work out. So the way we address it at Crunch, we've got this no judgments philosophy, and it's Endemic to our culture. We don't care what you look like, what gender you are, how you identify, what your politics are, your race, your ethnicity. We want everyone to have a place where they feel like they belong. And then we want to make sure that we make fitness functions we learned a long time ago. Our founder, Doug Levine, back in 1989, he recognized that human beings like to do things that they enjoy. They keep doing them over and over again. So how do we make the gym fun? So we've got crazy classes, we've got stupid puns on the wall. Like, we do things that, you know, it's like a wink and a nod, right? You look at the pun, you get it, you kind of laugh, you kind of chuckle to yourself. It's the lights, it's the music, it's the. The vibes. It's the team that we put in place. They're there to encourage all of those things for us, get you beyond those two barriers and then the creative. Justin, I'll let you take and talk a little bit about how you bring that to life in our campaigns.
- [21:24]
Justin Bajan
I would say that the strongest challenger brands have a mission and ethos that they don't just say they live out. And no Judgments has been something Crunch has lived out way back in the, you know, since the 90s. And the. The concept of no judgments becomes more relevant depending on where we are in the culture where we are today. It's. It's pretty. Pretty badass. I mean, saying it maybe five or six years ago might have been kind of not as salient. So. And the work that we do, it's just in the casting of the people that we put in our commercials. We want to reflect an inclusive environment from the person who's just starting to the person who's been there for years. There's other competitors that Crunch has that might cater to just one, just the beginner or just the expert. So we like to show the full range. Their competitor, Planet Fitness, likes to dump on people who are strong. They have the lunk alarm. They even stole no Judgments to an extent by having the judgment free zone, which I'm still not really quite sure what that means. So it's in the work that we do through the casting and then the work that we reflect in terms of the ideas need to draw people in and not push people away. So it's a great sort of governing dynamic that we have to work with. It gives us a lot to work from, and it's something that we always think of. Oh, that's very no judgments when we're.
- [22:53]
Chad Waitzig
Coming up with work.
- [22:54]
Shree Rajagopalan
I had no idea this conversation was going to be so much fun. Because when Chad started talking about the pins and the various pulleys, this is life for me now. So. And that one hour is so important to me. The repetition is so important to me. I actually don't get bored, Chad. I look forward to it. If you start going down my search browser and who I follow on Instagram, like 90% of them are fitness influencers. And I'm researching how to train the shoulder muscle, the various lats, which are different. You know, I'm actually studying muscle development, which you guys might laugh at me, actually. But, Chad, you know, we started talking about these quirky standout offerings that you guys have bought to crunch and the fact that Crunch actually has on its wall some of these messages. So while it's still appealing to a broad audience. So how do you strike that balance between staying bold and then yet being all inclusive? As Chad mentioned, it is for everybody.
- [23:52]
Chad Waitzig
Yeah, it's a really good question because, you know, as Justin alluded to, there are other brands in the category that have used humor as a way to break through. Right. But often that humor is poking fun at other gym goers, and we don't see it that way. Again, if you come to crunch, we admire you, we respect you. As our president said, they are working their hardest to become the best version of themselves, and that's worth celebrating. So when we talk about our members and the gym experience and crunch, that's always from a very positive, fun, engaging atmosphere where you start to look at being bold. It's in how you talk about the insights, the consumer insights that people are feeling that get you to the gym. So the latest campaign, Feel Good here is is based on the insight that 90% of consumers see fitness just as important for their mental health as their physical health, which you clearly have. Right. It's an hour a day for you to escape. The gym, for many people, is a place to escape. But why are they escaping and what our research shows for our target? Our target we call the young, strong, and social. They're adults 18 to 39. These folks are feeling the weight of the world. The news cycle is never ending, and it's often not very positive. We're more polarized politically than we have been in maybe 125 years. We've got wars going on halfway around the world. We've got economic turmoil. And I have not seen the jobs report today, but I'm not expecting it to be positive. You know, we've got all of these things going on and a generation of people who maybe are not going to make more money than their parents, for the first time in American history, they're feeling the weight of the world. And the gym is the place to get away with that. Well, how do you be bold to say we recognize that. And that's where this humor and this irreverency comes in. But the gym is your solace. And that's all about positivity. It's about inclusivity. And so for us, it's never about poking fun at others. It's always about highlighting the benefits.
- [26:15]
Shree Rajagopalan
So let's jump into a campaign, Chad. So walk us through how a crunch campaign actually gets born and comes to life right from the marketing brief, from the intel that you get that tells you you need to create a campaign a certain way. Then the marketing brief that goes over to Justin and then Justin, maybe you can chime in as well with how does the back and forth work before you both agree and it comes to life in production.
- [26:37]
Chad Waitzig
Yeah. So one of the great things about working with Familiar Creatures, I think there's an advantage of we were a challenger brand. We're, we're still, we're still a small company. We're, we're a big brand in the category, but we're still a small company. And Familiar Creatures is, is not a big holding company agency. They're, they're a small independent agency. And so we work hand in glove together. There isn't like my team or me sitting down writing a brief and throwing it over the transom to Justin and his team for them to react to. It's very collaborative. We, we have discussions about the year ahead. We do try to make sure our dollars work, work hard for us. So we typically do annual campaigns so that we have an opportunity to drive that message. Like we're not at risk of wear out. We're going to drive that message over and over and over the course of a year. So we start, in fact we started for 20, 26, we started in April and we started talking about consumer insights. We started talking about what's going on with our member base, what's going on with our growth, what's going on in society, what's changed versus where we've been. And so that lays the foundation. And this is a little different than maybe cpg, where you might have a really kind of tight concept around a product idea that has a very specific benefit. You know, we're a business where the consumer is the product right the consumer has to put in the work. So our job is to motivate them, to show them that we're the best brand, to help get them there. And so we start that process in April, and then those guys go to work and I'll let them talk about their process. But then they usually come back with a series of campaign or conceptual big ideas that we then move around and start to tighten up.
- [28:25]
Justin Bajan
Yeah, I think I'll add what's great about working with Chad and his team. He mentioned about the consumer being their number one focus this year. They invested in doing focus groups, doing individual qualitative interviews with different gym members, whether they go to crunch or not, whether they're working out now or not. And we got. I don't even know how many responses. They're all over an hour each. We got a lot of rich, deep information. It kind of. It kind of changed some of our assumptions and presumptions about what people think about working out and also what people think about crunch. And so it gave us this other objective view that made the work that we're actually going to be shooting something very soon much richer and come from a informed space beyond just your gut. I do, I do pride ourselves in our gut and how we can be decisive and draw upon our years of experience. But we got some interesting tidbits and insights. So we made sure that was part of our brief to our teams here at Familiar Creatures. And it was kind of a litmus test. Anytime we spent, they crunch saw work from us. Was it laddering up to what we learned from these consumers, or did it seem like it was veering too far from it? And knock on wood, the work that we'll be making is very close to what we were talking about and what we learned from these groups and other research.
- [29:55]
Chad Waitzig
And inevitably, every iterative campaign each year needs to elevate the brand more, needs to take us in a different space. And, you know, one of the great things about this latest campaign, the one we're running right now, is we've seen, you know, 66% improvement in aided awareness. We've seen purchase intent, we've seen ad recall double, we've seen purchase intent triple. So we continue to build the brand, and so the stories we tell can evolve over time because people are more familiar with this. We're in more people's consideration sets. So if you go back and look at what we did five years ago, it might be a little bit more fundamental about who is crunch today. We can ladder that up to something that's much more emotive and something that's much more of a brand story and less rational. So that's also part of the process we go through. You bet.
- [30:54]
Shree Rajagopalan
Let me remind our audience that we're speaking to Justin Bagen from the agency Familiar Creatures, and Chad Waitson, CMO at Crunch Fitness. So the next one is for both of you as well. And I'm going to go to what is the toughest creative or strategic challenge you've tackled together and how did you actually work through it?
- [31:10]
Chad Waitzig
For me, it's easy. It's how do you come out of the pandemic? What. What do we do? And because people, you know, let's just remember where we all were five years ago, six years ago, or five years ago, four years ago, people were terrified about being. Until the. Certainly until the vaccine came around, people were terrified about going back into gyms. And for me, that was the biggest campaign challenge. How do we craft a campaign? And I think what Justin and the Familiar Creatures team did is they leaned right into it.
- [31:49]
Justin Bajan
Yeah, I agree. And as I. Yes. And it. I would say when we started working with crunch, we tackled that problem first. And then we, as he said, he bought a second idea from that. And so we lived with that idea for a couple of years. But we wanted to see if we could dig deeper into the brand. It's a brand that's had the philosophy of no judgments forever. It's a brand that had added in the notion of making serious fitness fun. And we wanted to see was there a way that we could have an idea, a strategic position that could stand the test of time. So we went from doing, you know, big brand TV to going and doing strategic work that you might hire a consultant for. And it allowed us to meet all of the players, all the constituencies from. We know, Chad's team. So we have marketing covered, but they had a time, had two different CEOs that managed different parts of the business operations, and then the biggest franchise leaders. So I got to hear all of their unvarnished views of the work we've been doing for the last three years and years prior straight from them and then galvanizing everyone around an idea of bringing everyone literally together in one room in New York City and hashing things out, almost kind of like a mediation session. It was like, okay, you're saying this, you're saying this. Well, what should we do now? Bringing all those stakeholders together has given a fortified crunch, I feel like. And Chad could speak to it more than I. Around 11 thought that we've just been going off of for the last two and a half years. That hasn't gotten stale, which is making people feel good. And it was something that's in Crunch's DNA. We just hadn't figured out the words for it. And that was a challenge, just getting all those voices together and getting everyone to go, okay, yeah, I buy that.
- [33:48]
Chad Waitzig
And the great thing about that insight, that the agency helped us uncover this idea that at Crunch, you feel good, you feel the good, is that everyone feels it. Regardless of your fitness level. Right. It could be your first day working out, it could be your thousandth workout. Those endorphins are going to get going. You're going to have that sense of accomplishment. You're going to be tired, but it's that good tired. Right? Your muscles are going to be sore the next day. You know it, but it's going to be that good sore. You know, all of these things are going to happen and you do feel good again. No one ever walks out of the gym and says, God, I wish I hadn't done that. I wish I had stayed in bed an extra hour. No. People walk out and they feel good. And what, what we think we do different than everybody else is that we make the experience engaging in fun and our culture and our team is encouraging that we think we do it better than anybody else. And these guys really tapped into that.
- [34:45]
Shree Rajagopalan
And so, Justin, fitness marketing can really be tricky. You know, people's emotions, as we've been discussing through this entire podcast around health, are very personalized. Everyone feels different about it. How do you ensure the tone is always fun? And then Chad is said multiple times, motivating and never off key. That's like extraordinary discipline.
- [35:08]
Justin Bajan
Yeah, it's. We've noticed again, there's two sides you can fall off in the. On the fence of fitness marketing. One, it's so intimidating. Everyone is so strong and mean looking that it's unrelatable. The. The other side is it's so easy looking and so every day there's no aspirational quality to it. So it is a challenge because we try to make sure that we're having people really sweating, really working hard, but not focusing on the tendons and ligaments and the musculature, taking more zoomed out approach and showing the whole person. And when we have really strong people making sure that they are fun and engaging at the same time, and then when we have folks who are at the beginning of their fitness journey that we're trying to portray that they're working hard they're sweating and they're getting into it. So it's respecting that process and making you kind of root for the characters that you see. So even if the person is 6 foot 3 and built like a linebacker, you go, that guy's kind of fun. You know, he makes me laugh. And if the person is not of that stature, you go, I could see myself in that person's shoes. You don't look down on them.
- [36:21]
Chad Waitzig
You know, you know, the other thing we do, which I think, and we don't publicize it, and maybe we should, but both in our, in our video content, whether it's, it's TV commercials or social media, and a lot of our photography assets, certainly in our, in our television, a lot of the extras are real members. They're real members. At Crunch gyms. And certainly in our, in our photography, we certainly hire some models. But by and large these, these are real people. We do casting calls and we try to have a diverse group of our member base and we want those members to be reflective and our team members too. There's a lot of Crunch employees that show up in these ads as well because we do want to reflect a little bit of everybody.
- [37:10]
Shree Rajagopalan
That makes complete sense, guys. So, Chad, let me flip it over to you. You operate in gyms, but also digitally with streaming classes. So how do you think about campaigns that infuse that kind of digital piece of advertising that's so important today?
- [37:25]
Chad Waitzig
Yeah, that, that's a great question. Look, our, our, I mentioned it earlier, our target consumer is called young, strong and social. Young 18 to 39. I'm not, I'm not young.
- [37:38]
Shree Rajagopalan
They're spending a majority of the time.
- [37:40]
Chad Waitzig
On the handheld and they're spending a majority of their time with that device in their hand. Right? They are, they are digital and social first. But what's really interesting is that we over index not only on like social usage, but social communities. And those communities are either digital or in person, which I think is an interesting nuance about our target. And then strong. And you highlighted it early on about your fitness journey, which is focused on strength training. Strength training continues to grow in popularity I think over the last decade. I just saw stat, maybe it's the last, last 15 years. The. You. The time spent on strength training equipment and gyms has increased something like 350%. Women are focused on strength training more than ever before. And we're actually seeing that people are dialing back a little bit on cardio. Now. Cardio is important, but strength training is one of the best Ways for longevity, for overall health and wellness. And we're excited to see that so young, strong and social is an important part of our group. And what we saw, certainly during the pandemic, was that this audience wanted to keep working out. And so they pivoted and we pivoted to digital. We already had a digital streaming product. It was pretty small part of our business and you actually had to be a certain level of gym membership to have access to it. We opened that up free to everybody in our. Every member. We had. We opened that up for free and then we started running exercise classes on Facebook Live and Instagram Live. We wanted to keep our members engaged. We didn't bill them for it. We froze everybody's membership, but we wanted to make sure that they could continue to try to be the best versions of themselves through a really tough period for everybody. What we also recognize is that we needed to pivot and that when people came back to the gym, the use of hybrid workouts was going to. Our hypothesis was that it was going to increase. So we retired our old product called Crunch Lock and we relaunched it as Crunch Plus. Today we have probably close to 700 workouts on the platform. You can do it on Apple TV, Roku, your iPad, your iPhone, your Android device. We have all different types of workouts. So if you're into salsa dancing and Zumba, we've got that for you. If you're into strength training, we can. You've got a whole class on, you know, just building your core. If you're into breath, work, work, we've got that. If you want yoga, we've got that. And what we find is that it doesn't substitute the gym. And in fact, you can actually see lots of streaming brands out there in the fitness space have really struggled. And for us, it's not the core of our business, it's an add on, it's ancillary, it makes the brand more sticky and it makes your brand experience more full. Now, it's free for a certain class of membership tier, but most members, it's 2.99amonth. So it's not like this is an expensive add on. So our campaigns, first and foremost are about our brick and mortar gym experience, because that is where our consumer wants to be. The social aspect is about getting motivation from others, whether or not they have friendships in the gym and they go with a group. There's a whole tranche of people that love working out in a gym, even if they're by themselves, themselves. So again, for us, the streaming Product is important. We think we've got one of the best in the category. We've made significant investments in the architecture and infrastructure in the student, in the production studio, and we've got great, great workouts. But it is to supplement what you are doing in the gym.
- [41:15]
Shree Rajagopalan
No debate there whatsoever. So, Justin, in your years of working with Crunch Fitness, what have you learned about building strong beauty brand agency relationships that you could advise other agencies wanting to follow in your footsteps?
- [41:28]
Justin Bajan
I would say that you have to get past the holding of agendas and trying to appear a certain way and get towards transparency and honesty. Chad and I have a collegial relationship. We text an email here and there and, you know, we give it to each other straight. Hey, I don't think that went very well. What if we did this instead? There can be a, there can be this wall that's, that's unnecessary, artificially created between the agency and the client. And it's, and it's held there by just having formal meetings, having called meetings and kind of stewing in the background in between. If you can break past that and have a deeper relationship, you're going to both come with richer work together. And so I don't have a tremendous amount of advice other than your client is not an enemy, not an adversary. And I would say that the client, the agency necessarily might not be an adversary either. How can you guys work together in a more personal way to solve the same problems together?
- [42:42]
Shree Rajagopalan
And Chad, I'll ask you to append to that as a brand or a client in this case for an agency, what wisdom would you share that makes for the best agency and brand relationships?
- [42:53]
Chad Waitzig
Yeah, just to build on everything Justin just said, you know, the agency is only as good as the client. Right. So we have a lot of work to do to make sure that we are fostering a positive working relationship with the agency. That means we have to be transparent. We have to, we have to tell them what we think and why we think it. You know, it's, it's one thing to say that work isn't any good. That doesn't, that, that doesn't add any value to anybody if I can't tell you why. And by the way, I don't say that work isn't any good. It's all, it's all, it's all rainbows and, and unicorns with familiar creatures. But you've got to be transparent. You've got to be honest. You've got to, you've got to have a regular dialogue. We do text, we do Talk outside of work hours about work. I mean, it's, you know, it's about work. It's about the work. I think the other thing that's important too, for the agency, this would be my advice to agencies, and I think Familiar Creatures does this in spades, is that we're here to sell something. We want to develop great work, and I would love to win awards and do all of that stuff. But at the end of the day, I want to generate more sales, I want to transform more lives, I want to have more people and more Crunch in the world. And the only way we're going to do that is with really great advertising. And so those guys in Richmond at Familiar Creatures understand that, that both great work and business building work can go hand in hand. And so I think that's really important as well.
- [44:25]
Shree Rajagopalan
Chad, we'll wrap this up by asking you to give us a sneak peek into the future. AI is already here. It's a trend everybody's following. So where do you see Crunch's marketing and creative going in the next five years? And have you been thinking about AI at all?
- [44:39]
Chad Waitzig
I think about AI every day. It consumes me. It is the one thing I think about a lot. And every pitch, email, phone call that I get from everybody claims that they have AI. So I think the first challenge is sussing out what's real AI and what's just maybe a really good algorithm. So for us, AI will play a more important role in everything that we do. So, you know, we've been on a journey to better activate our first party data with a CDP and leveraging use cases, and both on acquisition, but member engagement and member retention, that will be more important over the next five years. And AI will play a role in all of that. So I think what you're going to see is you're going to see communications that are more tailored to the individual based on what we know about that individual. And that's one of the beautiful things about Crunch. We know all of our members and the key will be to do it in a way that is on brand, that's authentic. And so I don't see today, I don't see us creating commercials using AI. And I know some brands have done that and there's been some backlash. I don't think it's early days, but I do think the messaging and the stories we try to tell and the areas of focus will be greatly influenced by AI. And that's just on the marketing side. Look on the member engagement side, I think you've talked about wanting to know more about the best workouts to do, what to focus on, which muscles to focus on, what are the right exercises to focus on. I think AI is going to play a role in helping everybody get there. It's going to break that barrier that I don't even know where to start. I think AI is going to start that for us and it's going to do it in a way that feels real, feels authentic. And I think that what that's actually going to incentivize is people to take it to the next level and dive into personal training where you actually get. Because I think what people are going to get teased with is this one on one interaction, ones with technology and then me, they're going to fall in love with it. I think what's actually going to happen is they're going to say, I want more. And you only really get that when you have a trainer that you can work with one on one. So I actually see in the fitness space training growing over the next five years.
- [47:08]
Shree Rajagopalan
I certainly am one that's going to look forward to that. What a terrific, terrific conversation in a subject matter that I personally love. So that those make for the best conversations. Let me thank our audience for listening to this wonderful episode. Do leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, your favorite listening platform. As I mentioned, it informs us how we're doing and whether we're having the right conversations with the right folks. To all of you, sincere thank you from Peter and from me, you make the show happen to all our sponsors. Whether this podcast, parties, events, hosted, dinners, having us a panels. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Justin and Chad, thank you so much for joining me on a Friday afternoon.
- [47:44]
Chad Waitzig
The CPG Guys, thanks for having us. It was a pleasure.
- [47:47]
Justin Bajan
Yeah, this is great. Thank you sri.
- [47:49]
Shree Rajagopalan
Thank you guys. And that's a wrap of this episode off. Wait for it. The CPG Guys.
- [48:07]
Peter Vs Bond
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