Marketing in Fitness Post 2 - Interview with Julian Hooks: Multilevel Marketing with Beachbody LLC

Hello again readers of Jtrain Fitness! Today I'm bringing to you the second post in my "Marketing in Fitness" series. For this post, I'm going to share with you an interview I conducted with my friend Julian Hooks, who does affiliate marketing for Beachbody LLC. You can watch / listen to the entire interview by clicking the play button on the video above.

Beachbody is a company founded in 1998 by Jon Congdon and Carl Daikeler in Santa Monica, California. They are the company responsible for marketing the extremely popular P90X and Insanity workout programs. Since their inception, they have enjoyed great success in a short amount of time.

Beachbody is unique in that they rely on multilevel marketing to help sell their products. Rather than trying to market their products on their own, they provide their products to affiliates, who then use the Beachbody products to help market themselves with. The affiliates who promote the Beachbody products are rewarded with a commission on the sales that they generate.

During my interview with Julian, he discussed his involvement with Beachbody and how it is different from other multilevel marketing programs. He described how Beachbody doesn't let anyone join their program, and how you have to be the right candidate to market their brand. There's somewhat of a vetting process involved with individuals who apply to be an affiliate. Beachbody may also have their own dedicated individuals tasked with finding the right candidates. 

Julian also discussed how Beachbody is involved with setting prices for their products. While Beachbody doesn't allow their affiliates to set their own prices to beat out competition or make the company lose money, they do provide special offers like promo codes that their most profitable affiliates can use to drive even more sales through them.

This type of marketing campaign has been very successful for Beachbody, and  benefits both the company and the affiliate selling the products. For Beachbody, they can piggyback on the success of affiliates who are popular within the fitness community without having to spend a ton of money on developing their own marketing campaigns, and the affiliates benefit from being able to sell products that they don't have to develop themselves. Also, Beachbody only needs to pay large sums of commission to individuals who sell their products the best. For affiliates, they can use the Beachbody name and the popularity the company has generated from successful fitness programs and figureheads.

I think that this kind of marketing is really cool. It's somewhat similar to my previous Marketing in Fitness post, and maybe that's because the fitness community is starting to heavily utilize multilevel / affiliate marketing as a main source of marketing and outreach. I think that other companies across other brands not necessarily involved in fitness could benefit from developing a multi-level marketing strategy. Instead of throwing a ton of money into an in-house marketing campaign that hopefully connects with an audience, they can empower individuals interested in their brand to promote their product and only have to pay the affiliates that sell well. As Julian stated in my interview with him, the beauty of affiliate style marketing is that anyone can start today by being actively involved with the products they love. If you happen to have some kind of following within some realm, you can potentially find a way to develop a synergistic relationship between companies that cater to that realm and help elevate each other's growth. It will be interesting to see if companies start to move away from traditional marketing and start investing heavily into multilevel / affiliate based marketing in the future.

If you are interested in following Julian on social media or want to direct message him with any questions about multilevel marketing, please follow him on instagram @Hooksey9 .

-Jtrain

Sources:

1. http://www.teambeachbody.com/home
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beachbody
3.http://www.cnbc.com/id/41357825
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing
5. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0065-multilevel-marketing

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Marketing in Fitness Series: Post 1

Greetings once again readers of Jtrain Fitness! It's been a very long while, and I've missed all of you greatly. Recently, I started a program in E-Marketing with the University of Virginia and am tasked with weekly blog posts that have anything to do with marketing. I thought it was the perfect opportunity to start writing for this blog once again. So, for at least the next 10 weeks, I will be writing about something I find interesting regarding marketing and the world of fitness once a week. Let's get into it!

I've been hitting the gym consistently for 6 years now. Over that time, I've experimented with many types of gym styles that I felt fit my personality the best. I'm a huge fan of stringer tank tops, as you may already be familiar with after reading my most popular post on the science of tanktops. The issue however, has always been finding companies that offer this type of apparel as it is not a common piece of clothing worn regularly by people.

One brand that I started purchasing my stringer tank tops from early on was Physiq Apparel. Located in the UK, they were one of the few brands offering this type of clothing. I became a fan and started regularly purchasing their products. They're a fairly new company, and as such were looking for ways to get their name out there and sell their products to the ever growing fitness community.

Looking over their website, it is apparent to me that Physiq targets younger individuals to market their products to. One way that companies like Physiq have attempted to do this, is by utilizing platforms that younger audiences are actively engaged in nowadays.

Recently (I'm not sure how recently, but it's at least a year old), Physiq Apparel launched their "Team Physiq" program. Through this program, individuals can sign up to receive a special code that they can share on their social media platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, etc.). When someone enters said code at checkout on physiqapparel.com, they receive a discount on the item they are purchasing and the individual that the code is linked to gets a small percentage profit from the purchase.

I've actually joined the Team Physiq program in the past. Personally, I think it's a really good idea. In the fitness community, many people are trying to find a way to become the next big fitness celebrity and get brands to sponsor them. With the Team Physiq program, Physiq makes an individual feel as though they are being sponsored by a product. They are given a unique code for them to feel as though they are part of a select group of individuals with power within the brand, thus motivating them to sell the brand hard. On Physiq's side of the equation, they get individuals who are enthusiastic about selling their product via their social media platforms for a ton of exposure for very little cost. Furthermore, Physiq can use these codes to track which individuals are producing the most hits or where consumer data is coming from the most and can then create marketing campaigns around or further incentivize those sources to keep them selling their products. It's an extremely efficient process for Physiq Appparel both from a monetary and product exposure standpoint.

I think that an evolving strategy in e-marketing will be finding ways to engage consumers and turn them into liaisons to promote brands. Making individuals feel as though they are part of a team supporting their favorite brands while also receiving a small monetary reward will empower them with the desire to make sure they are doing as much as they can to promote the brand and in turn give the company free, quality marketing. People love to feel like they are being sponsored, being chosen by, or being a part of the brands / teams they love. To tap into that dynamic by utilizing an individual's passion for a product is something I can see happening for a lot of companies down the road.

-Jtrain

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*Have a question about natural bodybuilding / fitness / nutrition / stress?
Need some advice? Email me at jtrainfitness@gmail.com and I will answer
it on this blog! Be sure to enter your email to receive alerts for 
when the next blog post has come out, and be sure to tell your 
friends about this blog! Follow me on twitter @jtrainfitness and tell 
your friends to do the same!*
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