Officials at Iron Tribe Fitness know a little something about customer engagement and customer experience, evidenced by its Silver Award in the Best Customer Experience & Engagement category handed out at the inaugural Loyalty360 Awards held at the 7th Annual Loyalty Expo in 2014.
Building fitness communities is a key component in Iron Tribe’s path toward customer-centricity and providing an engaging customer experience.
Corbitt Chandler, VP of Marketing at Iron Tribe Fitness, talked to Loyalty360 about his company’s sheer dedication to its customers.
In the move toward customer-centricity, if you could give one piece of advice to a brand to help them increase loyalty and engagement with their customers, what would it be?
Define who you are and what you’re about. Our purpose is to create fitness communities that change lives. One of the most special things we do is the community aspect. In a lot of ways that is what differentiates us from our competitors. We can talk the product side all day long and how much weight our members have lost, but if we don’t get the community part right people won’t be coming back. It’s important to keep your purpose top of mind in everything you do.
Can you give us a high level overview of your customer philosophy and share how this perspective helps drive more effective engagement and, therefore, better marketing outcomes?
Part of our elevator pitch is that our target market is anyone who is willing to make a sacrifice to change their life. We say often that Iron Tribe is for anyone not everyone in that anyone can do it, but not everyone will make the sacrifice. As a marketer, I have to make sure that whatever online/offline tool I’m developing speaks to the everyman. It needs to show the stories of our athletes and the transformations they have been through in a way that’s relatable, but also speaks to someone that’s ready to make that commitment. 
Marketers are tasked to be more data-centric than ever before, yet the challenge of creating actionable insight from data is more challenging than before. What is your advice for marketers?
Keep it simple. When I first came to Iron Tribe we had a number of different campaigns running. My goal has been to simplify those as much as possible to what are the 10 major campaigns we are running in our corporate market. We task all of our managers with tracking where prospects come from and if we have to ask them to be Sherlock Holmes, we’re not going to get accurate data.
With the advent of social, mobile and other emerging technologies, how do brands effectively improve the customer experience and engage their audiences in this challenging and very dynamic marketing environment?
If you have the resources by developing your own online community that exists solely to benefit your network. We have the Iron Tribe Fitness app that is a virtual extension of that community aspect I mentioned earlier. Here, our athletes can dialogue, schedule their workouts, check other members scores, etc. It’s become a huge asset to our brand that’s engaged with daily. Things like this only further that unique customer experience that keeps them engaged and cuts out all the other noise.
How should brands attempt to keep up with the rapid proliferation of technologies, especially with some of the newer technologies harder to measure versus more traditional technologies that brands are more comfortable with?
We stick with the tried-and-true in a lot of ways, even so much as utilizing direct response tactics like direct mail to cut through the noise. Older forms of media like this are becoming the “blue ocean” as opposed to some of the newer mediums on the market that everyone’s fighting for attention on. At the very least, I wouldn’t suggest being in a rush to jump on whatever the latest and greatest tech is.