The Adelaide Club has won the recognition-recollection game with a Coyote marketing campaign
By Jennifer H. McInerney
Sometimes, in any business, and often, in the health and fitness club industry, it makes sense to contradict -- or, at the very least, tweak-the conventional wisdom.
Witness, for example, the innovative and clever ad campaign that the Adelaide Club, in Toronto, has utilized successfully for the past seven years to help it, first, halt and, then, reverse a gradual decline in memberships.
Most club advertising, we don't need to tell you, tends to feature one of two things: beautiful young men and women with implausible hard-body physiques or discounted prices.
The first ploy, while it may have played a role in attracting the 14 percent of the population that belongs to clubs, may have been equally effective in scaring off the other 86 percent. And the second, while it may also have produced results, tended to undermine the value of the product and put pressure on profitability.
Clive Caldwell, the president and owner of Adelaide, and president of the Cambridge Group of Clubs, the six-facility chain to which it belongs, believed that there was a lot of room for improvement. 'We wanted to do something unique and image-oriented rather than the traditional pricing approach that so many clubs employ,' he explains. 'We wanted to stress that Adelaide was more than a place to exercise-that it was, in fact, a club, a community.'
Caldwell also wanted the ads to do a much better job of reflecting reality and resonating with the demographic the club targeted-professionals (e.g., lawyers, accountants, and stockbrokers) in their 30s and 40s, who were either new to or estranged from fitness, and 90 percent of whom worked in the downtown area. Adelaide, a full-service, 40,000-square-foot facility, is located at the base of Canada's largest office tower, the 72-storey First Canadian Place, and includes a fitness center, four exercise studios, squash courts, a spa, food and beverage component, and a health center offering professional services provided by nutritionists, physiotherapists, and chiropractors.
To help him realize his ambition, Caldwell turned to the Coyote Marketing Group, an agency that had earned a reputation for creativity while working on campaigns for clients such as Sprint and Porsche. The pieces that Coyote produced for the club are simple, straightforward, down to earth, often humorous, unfailingly clever, and, perhaps most importantly, invariably prompt the viewer to stop and think about the idea being expressed.
Typical of the group is one ad that shows a shirtless, middle-aged man with a slight paunch who, despite his decidedly ordinarily appearance, is posing proudly, biceps flexed, for the 'After' shot in a 'Before and After' series. The text beneath the photo triumphantly declares, 'You should have seen me before!' The message is clear: A club can help a person look and feel better. There's no need for them to strive to be perfect.
Bob Wyatt, the president of Coyote, notes that such ads appeal to baby boomers who, while they recognize and appreciate the value of fitness, may be intimidated by the images of lean, lithe models that so many clubs adopt. 'The fitness industry routinely does advertising that focuses on exquisite, exceptional, bodies -- everyone looks like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie or better,' he explains. “Our feeling was, that's not going to work with this target group because they'll take one look at the rippling abs and say, 'I've got to work out beside someone who looks that that? I don't want to.'
'We thought that this fear of embarrassment, of, in a sense, failing-particularly among people who have been so successful in other areas of their lives-was a reason that a lot of them weren't joining a club.'
Coyote's strategy involved shifting the emphasis from pumping iron to the entire club experience. The debut ad in the campaign, for instance, called attention to the $1.25-million renovation that Adelaide had recently undergone in an elegant, but powerful, way. The text reads, 'One of our most popular new pieces of equipment.' The accompanying photo shows-not a high-tech treadmill or a state-of-the-art stationary bike, but, rather, a large, plush, black leather couch. Another installment in the series admonishes 'Flex your muscles.' The companion photo offers up a plate of steaming, appetizing, shellfish from the club's restaurant.
The notion of promoting a club without pushing workouts was novel, refreshing, one that Toronto residents had never encountered before, and one that they embraced.
Adelaide not only took a surprising approach with the ads themselves, but with how they were deployed as well. Initially, the print pieces appeared in local newspapers and magazines, which quickly proved to be inefficient, both in terms of cost and results. Rather than market broadly, and blindly, to the entire city of 2.5 million people, Caldwell and his team decided to go directly-nearly face-to-face-to the prospects they were pursuing. Their medium of choice: 3' x 5' back-lit signs blanketing the downtown business zone.
Beneath the streets and dozens of office towers that comprise Toronto's skyline lies an underground network of connected passageways lined with retail outlets-a subterranean version of an upscale shopping mall. Adelaide's billboard-style ads dominate the heavily trafficked underground corridors and busy marketplace, and, now, the professionals who work in the city's downtown district are a nearly captive audience for the club's imaginative marketing.
'Our market-professionals working in the downtown core-is so clearly defined that we decided it was wasteful to continue advertising in newspapers and magazines,' Caldwell points out. 'These back-lit signs were an obvious choice-people pass by them all the time.'
An added bonus of the signs is their price tag: just $600 per month for each location-a dramatic savings on the $6,000-$8,000 cost of a single ad in a monthly magazine-which permits Adelaide to proclaim its bold poster-sized message at as many as a dozen downtown locations simultaneously. Lorna Smith, the general manager of the club, says that, for the past seven years, it's spent an average of $100,000 a year on the Coyote campaign, and, she observes, it's definitely paid dividends.
'At least 80 percent of the people who come in to tour the club have seen the ads,' she reports, 'and have positive things to say about them.'
The initiative reversed a long slow decline in membership, precipitated, primarily, by increased competition, and has helped Adelaide to grow to 3,400 members.
Independently, Caldwell and Smith both rank the impact of the ongoing Coyote attack at 8.5 on a 1 (worst)-10 (perfect) scale. 'The campaign has improved our image, and the community now has a much better idea of who we really are and what we really represent,' reflects Smith. 'It's communicated our uniqueness very effectively.' As a result, the Cambridge Group, which has a total of 13,000 members, has recently retained Coyote to handle marketing for all six of its facilities. And, later this month, Adelaide will unveil the latest in its series of unorthodox, out-of-the-box, and out-of-the-ballpark ads.
