Building a Beast
What your training course can learn from Charles Atlas
Charles Atlas sold a lot of body building courses. The adverts for his course are kitsch classics. The Who even wrote a song about them.
Every ad told a story, something like:
I was [a 7 stone weakling]
until the [Charles Atlas course with ‘Dynamic Tension’]
turned me into [a beast of a man].
If you want your training product to sell, try creating a similar testimonial — before you create the product:
I was [something the target customer dislikes about their current situation]
until the [name of course] with [unique content proposition]
turned me into [a reversal of the original situation].
Be frank about your target customer. Lazy thinking would define Charles Atlas’s target customer as “people who are interested in bodybuilding”.
That wasn’t good enough for Charles and it’s not good enough for you.
His target audience, as shown in all his advertising, was:
“Teenage boys with scrawny bodies who are tired of being looked down on and want to do something about it.”
Anybody who was interested in bodybuilding could take the course. But Charles Atlas targeted only the group who needed him most.
If you want your training product to sell, ask yourself:
- Who really needs this course — and will be willing to invest time and money to make a change?
- How would they define their problem?
- What do they want to become or achieve?
- What unique content proposition can I use to stand out from the competition?
If you create training with this in mind, you’ll turn it from a 7-stone weakling into a beast of a course.
