At the start of 2003 Bally Total Fitness had developed a
reputation as being none too friendly to the press. Reporters might
have to wait two weeks to get their calls returned from the
nation's largest operator of commercial fitness centers, which
rarely ran major national PR campaigns.
Bally's longtime PR council MWW Group set about fixing that
situation last year, with an effort intended to revamp media
perception of the company while simultaneously lending energy and
impetus to the company's big picture marketing goal of boosting its
membership numbers.
"We have been fortunate in that the [Bally] management team has
embraced PR and they understand the value of the PR as a marketing
function," says MWW Account Supervisor Joe Cohen.
Take, for example, Bally's "Feeling Fat Friday" program. It
offers free workout time on the day after the annual Thanksgiving
binge and, again, on the day after New Year's. "It's always about
driving club traffic and driving sales," adds Carreen Winters,
senior vice president at MWW Group. "The media usually goes to the
mall on 'Black Friday,' and so we developed this whole strategic
platform of Feeling Fat Friday that gave the media something else
to focus on, that highlighted the notion of holiday weight gain.
Then we had a call to action to consumers by opening all the clubs
for a free workout on that day."
At the same time, the PR team worked hard to rebuild Bally's
credibility with the media, instituting a "same day turnaround"
policy for all incoming PR opportunities.
"Bally has supervisors, each of whom oversees several different
geographic markets. So we would work very closely with those
supervisors to find their most talented people" within each region,
Cohen says. These potential spokespersons then were trained in
one-on-one sessions at MWW offices in New York and at Bally's
office in Chicago. With this web of representatives deployed
nationwide, the PR team was able to establish uniform procedures
for tackling incoming calls at the local, regional and national
levels.
As the media relationships improved, the PR team was careful to
remain low-key in its support for the client's marketing efforts.
Even when the goal is to get bodies in the door, the approach must
be at least somewhat circumspect. Winters says: "Instead of going
out there with a message that said, 'Come to Bally to shed the
pounds,' we went at it with statistics about what happens to people
over the holidays, statistics about New Year's resolutions, and
then advice about how to stick to your New Year's resolutions."
Along the way, the PR team also positioned Bally's executives as
experts on a range of issues facing the fitness industry, including
the certification process for personal trainers and the debate on
banning cell phone cameras from locker rooms.
The PR team at MWW and reps from Bally's marketing department
worked in concert to improve Bally's reputation with the media.
Research conducted by Bally's found that more than half of
Americans are obese and want to lose weight, but lack proper
education on combining fitness and nutrition. Working with this
data, MWW then crafted media messages in the form of an educational
initiative meant to enlighten the public on the benefits of
combining exercise with a healthy diet.
To that same end the PR team worked to formulate a "Lifestyle
Makeover" campaign, positioning Bally's personal trainers as
fitness gurus while also promoting the rollout of Bally's Weight
Management Program (WMP), a new personal training system that
combines fitness and nutritional instruction. Bally trainers
promoted the launch of Bally's Weight Management Program in a
series of on-air challenges, including three segments on the
"Howard Stern Show" on E! Entertainment Television. The team also
got personal training makeover coverage through yak shows like "The
View," "The Ricki Lake Show" and "The Montel Williams Show."
The result of that relationship has been an impressive array of
media coverage in the last year. Stories have appeared on "NBC
Today Show" and "The View," as well as in the Wall Street Journal,
the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan, Woman's Day
and many other publications. In all, the campaign has generated
some 875 million media impressions.
Moreover, the effort had a positive impact on the bottom line,
as was evident by the end of the year. December 2003 finished 14%
ahead of the same period in 2002 in sales revenue, enabling Bally
to record a fourth quarter that was plus 3% versus the prior
year.
Contacts: Joe Cohen, 201.964.2443, [email protected]; Carreen Winters,
201.964.2410, [email protected]
Research Pumps up Fitness Campaign
Before setting out to reshape Bally Total Fitness' media
relationships, MWW Group dug deep in order to find out what it
would be up against.
- The PR firm analyzed twelve months of research data prepared by
Bally's advertising and marketing departments. This led to the
development of an educational PR initiative to inform the public of
the benefits of combining exercise with a healthy diet. - MWW prepared a comprehensive 200-page report analyzing the PR
efforts of Bally's top 10 competitors. It showed strong media
efforts from among the regional players, but no national PR
programs in place among national competitors. - The PR team also conducted a series of perception audits, which
confirmed that media contacts across the board - national and local
- found Bally "unresponsive," "uncooperative" and
"slow-moving."