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
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *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 Instagram @jtrain1224 and tell
your friends to do the same!*
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment