Over the weekend, activewear brand Gymshark opened its doors to the public for the first time, introducing it’s highly-anticipated store to London.
Swarmed with hundreds of customers, influencer invites and mobile digital billboards, the 18,000 sq ft store is equipped with everything from squat racks, a sweat room and an exclusive Joe & the Juice concession, with a rebranded logo.
Marketing Beat caught up with chief branding officer Noel Mack and CEO Ben Francis at Gymshark’s new store to discuss the importance of marketing, campaign successes, failures and competition with Nike, located meters away from the flagship.
On the importance of marketing
“The word, marketing, feels like a business holding a megaphone and just talking to people, what we do is quite different”, Mack says.
“The way older brands would have worked is that they would create a huge campaign, pay loads of money on it and plaster it everywhere and cross their fingers and hope it has the impact they want it”.
Mack describes Gymshark’s marketing as a “feedback cycle” where the brand can have constant conversations with the customers when it posts on social media.
“Within four minutes, we have an inkling on if the customer loves the campaign or hates it”.
Someone who agrees is Gymshark CEO, Ben Francis. He tells Marketing Beat: “Marketing for the company is ultimately huge, it is how we get eyes on the brand. It is what gets people through the door.”
Over the weekend the activewear retailer opened its doors to the public, attracting hundreds of customers.
In the works since the pandemic, the new store features a fitness studio that offers a rotating programme of classes for customers, called ‘The Sweat Room’, alongside The Pro Bench’ – a dedicated area where Gymshark personal trainers can offer fitness advice 1-2-1.
The store is also home to the company’s ‘The Hub’, a space where its community can host a range of activities from workshops, podcasts and panels.
Despite the start of the company’s omnichannel approach, the Gymshark team reveals its marketing strategy will be no different, aside from leaning more into online marketing, which will push people towards the store, however, Mack insists just because Gymshark will not lean more into offline marketing just because it now has an offline store.
On favourite campaigns
“My favourite campaign has to be our Deload campaign with CALM,” Mack says.
In July this year, Gymshark opened a barbershop in partnership with Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) to allow men to open up about their mental health while getting a haircut. Situated in Shoreditch, the campaign was described as a ‘non-judgemental safe space’ where men can chat with professionals about their mental well-being alongside a free trim.
“We’re big believers that physical health and mental health are like intrinsically linked,” he says.
He explains: “The whole idea when it came to mental health the campaign was that you take the weight off. Deloading in bodybuilding is a week where you still go and train, but you take off all the weight, and you just go through the motions.
He continues: “It wasn’t we just paid for loads of billboards and wrote the word Gymshark on it, for people to read it and question what the brand was. People heard this brand did this cool thing, and for me, that’s a great kind of brand awareness.”
On influencer marketing
Many of Gymshark’s athletes from across the globe were present at the launch of the flagship store, including YouTube group the Sidemen’s Behzinga (Ethan Payne) and Strictly Come Dancing star and social media influencer Saffron Barker.
But how does the company choose its team of athletes?
According to Mack the company now looks for “unique stories” compared to when starting out.
“Before we used to look for people who looked very similar, and looked a particular way, compared to now where we look for more unique stories”
Mack uses Alex Tilinca as an example of this, who was named Gymshark’s first transgender athlete, as well as Rob Kearney, who calls himself “the world’s strongest gay”.
However, he says “if you can’t influence then you can’t be influenced. That’s just like being a mechanic when you know nothing about cars.”
On keeping up with trends
“You have to move at the speed of culture”, Mack laughs.”It moves so fast, and brands have to be ready to move at the same speed”.
“Speed is the new scale. You can grab more market share and more share in voice if you are the first one to the particular topic”.
However, Mack uses Adidas as an example of how trends can hinder a brand.
He says the rival clothing brand was “not fast enough” when cutting ties with Kanye West over antisemitism comments. Mack adds: “Culture moved fast, Adidas could not keep up and now the public is calling the company out saying its silence is deafening”.
On campaign failures
According to Gymshark’s chief branding officer for every successful campaign, there were around five others that failed.
Despite, Mack not revealing which campaigns flopped, he adds: “The campaigns got to the eleventh hour and we just went, ‘it’s not right and decided to scrap it, or, we did put it out just didn’t make any noise about it and lowered our expectations.
However, he continues to say the most important part of marketing is a failure. “You have to be ready to embrace failure and learn from it for next time,” he says.
Mack adds that there are many campaigns the proud-British retailer has put out and have failed, but with one tiny adjustment, it ran wonders.
On the power of social media
With the Nike flagship store meters away from Gymshark’s new residency, the idea of community is what Gymshark believes will be the differentiator.
“If we have a pound-to-pound marketing war with Nike, we’re going to lose,” he says. “If I was going to beat up Floyd Mayweather, I’m not going to box him, that would be a ridiculous idea. So, we are not going to go in a billboard ad war against Nike, we just have to find other ways of doing it”.
Mack uses influencer marketing as an example and reveals that Gymshark has eight billion views on #Gymshark on Tiktok.
“We had 1.5 million followers on Tiktok before Nike joined because we’re agile, and we’re quick to market. So, we’re going to be smart and play the game by different sets of rules.”
Mack continues: “The brand is a community and it just so happens that communities are all on social media.
“Wherever the communities are Gymshark will be there, whether we take it back to forums or public meet-ups. We will be there there”
