IHRSA is now the Health & Fitness Association.

The Marketing Overhaul: Three Actions to Drive Profitable Growth

Learn the three pillars of marketing strategy and dive deep into marketing tactics that will allow you to implement each marketing pillar without a large marketing budget.

This year’s convention in Los Angeles will be my 20th IHRSA. I’ve attended hundreds of sessions and taken thousands of pages of notes on every conceivable topic.

As Howard Schultz, the long-time CEO of Starbucks observes, “Learning drives our passion.”

For 19 consecutive conventions, IHRSA and the hundreds of presenters I’ve listened to have driven my passion for building a great brand. For the last 18 years, I’ve owned Discover Strength, a boutique fitness studio concept focused entirely on strength training. For the last 14 years, I’ve worked side by side with one of the most skilled marketers not just in our industry but any industry, Hannah Johnson, as we’ve built Discover Strength into a thriving brand with locations in 10 states and a system-wide Net Promoter Score of 94.

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At this year’s convention, Hannah and I will introduce the three strategic pillars that we’ve built our marketing efforts around.

  1. What are the strategic differentiators of the business? This will serve as the foundation of the strategy.
  2. How do we position the customer as the hero of our story (and not us, the club operator)?
  3. How do we operationalize the marketing that actually drives referrals?

Next, and more importantly, we’ll outline a simple but powerful framework for you to develop your own pillars for your clubs or studios. We’ll argue that it’s nearly impossible to make intelligent day-to-day marketing decisions unless we have wrestled with and answered the above questions.

From there, we’ll bring the strategy down to the ground and discuss what a comprehensive marketing activation plan should look like.

You will leave this session with clear next steps on how to overhaul your marketing in a way that drives new customer acquisition, contributes to retention, drives profitable growth, and ultimately, lays the foundation for a strong brand that can weather storms, charge premium prices, and compete in highly competitive markets.

And none of this will be theory; we’ll share the exact steps that Discover Strength has taken over the last two decades and talk about how they can apply to your brand.

To learn more, we encourage you to attend our session from 1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Friday, March 8.

Author avatar

Luke Carlson

Luke Carlson is the founder and CEO of Discover Strength based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is an American College of Sports Medicine certified exercise physiologist and has a bachelor's degree and master's degree in kinesiology from the University of Minnesota. He graduated from the Executive Leadership, Strategy and Innovation program at Stanford University. He received an honorary Ph.D. from Solent University in Southhampton, England. Luke serves on the IHRSA Board of Directors.