[Cache – #164]
How many of your customers have tattooed your logo on their bodies?
If your company happens be called Anytime Fitness, a chain of more than 2,400 gyms in 19 countries, your answer, according to a BBC News story this week, is 3,000.
Especially interesting is that the Anytime logo is not a well done piece of artwork: it looks surprisingly amateurish for such a large organization. Intended to look like a person while running or exercising, it looks more like a sketch of Gumby stumbling to the bathroom. See how professional and refined the Under Armour and Nike logos, also from the fitness category, look in comparison.
So it’s not a kickass logo that is compelling Anytime’s customers to make what is a truly remark-able demonstration of bonding with the company. Instead, it is the way the company helped them feel.
Says Chuck Runyon, the Anytime founder: “Instead the answers are always very, very personal. Many say they got the tattoo to mark the fact they have achieved something they never thought was possible, such as losing a considerable amount of weight, or feeling healthy.”
For Runyon, making customers feel good is a deliberate strategy: “The company works hard to make them feel good about themselves, and that they belong to a caring community.”
There is still no excuse for having an unprofessional logo that portrays your brand in a less-than-positive light. But the real question is: how do you make your customers feel – good enough to give you their minds, if not their bodies?
Thanks to Robert Gillelan, my Coin colleague in Quebec, for this story idea.
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New Andris Pone comment in the National Post: “Birks and Tiffany & Co: Battle of the Blue Jewelry Boxes.”
Book: Buy the #1 Globe and Mail bestselling Brand: It Ain’t the Logo or download a free chapter.
