Not For Everyone

How Equinox sweats the details to build an experience-driven brand

Equinox has the kind of relationship with its customers — and, frankly, the kind of customers — that would make most marketers envious: the company has intimate, multi-faceted, and frequent interactions with a particularly dedicated kind of consumer for whom the brand experience is less a transaction than a ritual, or identity marker.

That status, of course, comes with commensurate challenges. Multiple levels of interaction mean countless things to get exactly right for an audience with lofty expectations. Those challenges extend to marketing and they include, but are not limited to: selling a lifestyle to the person who has, and has seen, everything, growing without diluting your concentrated essence of luxury, cultivating a persona that feels inclusive and exclusive at the same time, and ensuring everything from the locker room to your advertising lives up to your core belief—that it’s not fitness, it’s life.

Operating at that level of difficulty, well, it’s not for everyone, as Equinox likes to say. And as the brand marks its 25th anniversary, the number of moving parts is only increasing. The company that started with one New York gym in 1991 has grown to 86 clubs (soon 100) globally, has expanded the offerings at those clubs, and added new brands, acquiring Soul Cycle in 2011. Now it’s expanding into brand new territory, with the first Equinox Hotel, “a completely new 360-degree lifestyle experience,” set to launch in 2019 in New York’s Hudson Yards.

To mark the anniversary, we talked with the woman who helps keep the brand fit as the operation expands. Elizabeth Nolan worked as a copywriter and a creative director at Victoria’s Secret before joining Equinox in 2013. Now, as executive creative director, she works alongside Equinox’s executive leadership team and a team of 18 creatives managing all facets of the brand. She also works with agency partner of the last four years, WKNY, to orchestrate the brand’s famously provocative advertising. The challenge that came with the latest campaign was, as always, formidable: raising the bar on last year’s headline-generating “Commit To Something” initiative while ensuring that the provocation was grounded in purpose, and not all just shock and abs.

We talked to Nolan about the new campaign, the 25th anniversary, and what love’s got to do with creativity.

WKNY: You introduced “Commit To Something” last year and you’ve doubled down and built on it in really interesting ways. Talk about the core idea behind the campaign and what your specific goals were for this year.

EN: Commit to Something really emerged in the first year out of a great insight about the fact that we are living in a moment where commitment is perceived as not being particularly sexy or cool. We are surrounded by competitors who are offering people flexibility and we’re a club-model business, where we are asking for a year-long commitment from our members. So I think what was really ingenious about the platform and the strategy was to take that challenge and make it something cool and interesting.

Commit to Something is a very simple line, a very bold idea, but it really resonated in this moment. So year one, as I think happens with all campaigns, kind of established the story and did so in a very compelling way. In year two, we just pushed the story further. I think the stories this year are more interesting, more provocative and also much more closely tied to the notion of human identity. And I’m going to be honest, I don’t know that it was completely deliberate but we have ended up with these eight stories of individual identity that are really powerful. I do think it’s a step up from last year; I think the story is deeper.

You have to introduce the world to an idea sometimes before you can really take it to the next level. Wieden+Kennedy New York did a great job of taking the story to the next level this year. It definitely feels even bolder, even more thought provoking, even more arresting than it was in year one.

What did you learn from the reaction last year? Because even though the vast majority has been positive, these are provocative ideas that not everybody is going to like. How much do you monitor the response and how do you process it?

We are always learning from the way that the world responds to our creative. We never set out to offend anybody. But we also have a very strong belief that we have the right to be able to put a bold message into the world, and we’re never going to back down from that. So I think it’s always a combination of the bravery of this brand, knowing that we are going to push boundaries, that we’re going to do things that other brands may not do, but also knowing we never set out to intentionally create controversy for the sake of controversy.

You’ve also said you’re never going to just put a treadmill in an ad, i.e., you’re never going to just talk about fitness per se. Is it because it’s such an experience-driven brand — your line, after all is, “It’s not fitness, it’s life” — that you kind of have to transcend the “gym” in your marketing?

Yes. Equinox is becoming more and more of a lifestyle brand and I think our members feel that. That’s not just us telling them that, that’s us seeing the way that our brand is starting to take shape in the world, and not just with the fitness clubs now but with things like the emergence of a hotel. It’s just becoming a much more holistic proposition.

And you know, “It’s not fitness, it’s life” is a tagline that’s been around for ten or fifteen years now. But I actually think it becomes more and more true as time goes on. It’s a great line. We sort of are growing into the line. The reasons people are coming to our club are myriad and infinite and they have nothing to do with just working out. They have to do with the kind of life that people want to lead. And that’s a huge responsibility and it is felt at every level of the company. It is in our mission statement. Our goal is to maximize the potential in people’s lives and we take that very seriously.

One of the headlines from last year’s media coverage of the campaign was “Does this Equinox campaign make you feel uncomfortable? Good.” Marketers traditionally want to stay very clear of anything to do with discomfort. It’s interesting that your product itself does deal with discomfort — there is a discomfort to improving from a fitness standpoint — and that you’ve harnessed that in your marketing.

Yes, and I think overtly so. I’ve been talking a lot at events lately about what it means to be a brave brand. We are just living in a moment of where we are inundated with content, imagery, and advertising. It’s overwhelming and hard for any person to navigate their way through it, even if you work in this industry. And I think the only way that brands can actually make a mark for themselves is to really be brave and honest and not many brands are. It’s very hard to think about the ones that are doing anything that’s particularly brave. There’s a sea of anonymity.

But that’s not what we’re interested in being. We are a luxury service and thankfully we have the permission to be provocative and not to have to appeal to hundreds of millions of people. We can appeal to a smaller group of people who have a shared mindset and that’s a really beautiful position to be in.

You’re a brand where people are interacting with you several times a week, which is a great connection, but it introduces more challenges, more things to get right across communications, service, product. Equinox seems like a brand where there is a sense of overall experience design. How does that impact your process and the way you and your marketing team work?

Compared to other organizations I’ve worked in, where maybe corporate is at the top of the pyramid and leads the conversation, we are a field-up organization. So the field drives the thinking here. The clubs, the members, the employees on the ground are the most important part of Equinox and we are in service of them. As a result everything we do is driven by the experiential piece of the brand, not the other way around, which sounds simple but is very different from a lot of corporate cultures. It’s a different dynamic.

You have made a commitment to content, with your long-running Q site recently rebranding to Furthermore. How do you see the role of content in driving your business and brand goals and how do you see content and advertising overlapping? It seems like they are merging more and more into one thing.

Furthermore, which is run by Executive Managing Director, Liz Miersch, reflects what I would say is the lifestyle side of our brand and it’s a brilliant way of us being able to play in that lifestyle space, slightly separated from the core Equinox brand.

But in terms of the core Equinox brand, we obviously have our social channels where we do a wide array of content development too, which tends to be much more focused on the Equinox world. So we always sort of say Furthermore is “the world” and Equinox content is “our world”. So there’s that kind of duality between the points of view.

But yes, content is obviously massively important to any brand now. We just launched the campaign January 3 and in the first eight days, on our social channels, we really doubled down on video and animation in a way that we’ve never done before, and we’re really seeing the rewards from that already. So in the first eight days of the year we have more engagement than we did in the first 30 of last year, I think predominantly because we have posted video content.

Content will continue to be an important part of who we are and what we do and we will just keep testing, learning to see what we think works, and what doesn’t work and kind of push the boundaries on it.

I wanted to talk about measuring success. It’s a big question in marketing: brands can measure cultural impact in headlines and page views, etc., but then how does that translate to goals/gains for the company? How are you measuring the success of your marketing in that sense?

The fundamental measure of success here is always sales. So whatever we do, if it does not translate to more people coming through the door it fundamentally hasn’t worked. So sales are our number one metric and always will be. We have multiple other metrics in terms of engagement views, sharing, all of the usual things that people are tracking on social now.

I would not say that we’re a metrics-driven brand. The business is a sales-driven organization and that’s what really matters. Other than that, we as a marketing / creative / PR team track and hold ourselves accountable to things like: is our brand gaining traction, are we getting more press, are we seeing more engagement? And definitely for us engagement is key. Views and impressions are great but we want engagement; we want people to talk to us, about us. That’s why we put the work out that we do…we’re not just looking for giant impression numbers, it’s the quality of the engagement. That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for because then I know that it’s making a difference and people are really seeing it. I would much rather have quality of engagement and depth of engagement than just a million different impressions because, I mean, does anyone know what that means? I don’t know. (laughs)

So you would say that creating these provocative, more meaningful, if you will, images and actions has translated to success?

Absolutely. I would say we are a significantly different brand today than we were four years ago and every year we get better and better; we get better at advertising, we get better at marketing, we get better at PR. We are evolving all the time. We have gone from being, I would say, a company that was really, really good at operating clubs to being a company that’s really, really good at operating clubs and is also becoming a great brand. So that is something that we’re all very proud of.

How do you personally keep up? Being in marketing right now is just such a different proposition than even ten years ago. So how do you, personally, as a creative person, deal with the infinite inputs and outputs. And then, as a company how do determine what to focus on, what’s important, without chasing after every trend?

(Keeping up with) the world in general? Yeah, I mean look, does anyone? I don’t think it’s possible. I think I’m somewhat traditional, I’m a reader, I’m a theater-goer, I’m an art lover. I tend to get my inspiration more from classic sources versus trends. Particularly in terms of technology, I find it difficult to discern what’s going to stick and what’s not, and I hire the people to help me do that who are way better at it than me. My viewpoint tends to be a little more timeless, I would say. I still go back to literature, I still go back to galleries and museums.

And then in terms of focus and what should we be tackling, as a brand, I worked at Victoria’s Secret for five years and the CEO, Les Wexner, had a really great mantra — that you should always focus on the few that drive the many. Whenever I get into times of stress, I think about that. I think, on my list of a hundred things, what are the few things that are going to have the biggest results? Focus on those. Put your energy and time into the things that will have the biggest impact and you have to let the other things go.

How do you maintain a creative culture?

It’s a great question. I’ve been thinking a lot lately — and maybe I’ll write a book about it one day — about this idea of leading with love. And I’ve been thinking about it a lot with Obama going, and looking at my favorite sports team (the Liverpool football club), and as I look around, I see this transition in leadership to leaders who are able to lead with love.

I think creatives just need love. It’s as simple as that. You’ve got to take care of them. And I try to do that. I try to give them a little bit of love every day and be present and be available, and that’s the thing I’ve been thinking about most lately. I think fundamentally it’s, do they believe that you care about them and do you love them? I genuinely love my team and I think that helps maintain a creative culture.

By Wieden+Kennedy New York