Marketing without Fear: SoulCycle
Anyone that knows me personally, knows that my wife, Jamie Greenberg and I are a little obsessed with SoulCycle. We both find the workout really helps us achieve our fitness goals. The tribe culture and spiritual nature of the class speaks to us both. When possible, we ride 2–3 times per week, whether in LA, NYC or Chicago for business or pleasure, we consider the location of SoulCycle in our lodging and daily routines. We’ve even traded expensive dinners with bottles of wine on date nights, for SoulCycle and smoothies on Saturday mornings.
Recently, I’ve been using it as a relationship building exercise, no pun intended, with some of my favorite clients and collaborators. I often ask them to join me for a ride in the days before or after a film shoot together. My treat.
Not sure what type of customer that makes us. I’d say preferential or VIP might be good terms. We follow them and our favorite instructors on social media, shout out to Angela and Pixie, and 100% recommend SoulCycle to our friends, family and colleagues.
Clients like Jamie and me are the reason that the company has grown to over 75 locations in 15 markets without a major integrated marketing campaign.
As a student of marketing, an entrepreneur and producer, I’m a huge fan of the SoulCycle brand. I firmly believe in word of mouth marketing for businesses small and large and the idea of community building is way more attractive to me than any form of advertising. These pillars of marketing are at the center of how I’m building my company Duck Pond and has been instrumental to our success in audience development and social storytelling for the past 12 months. A key component to this process is customer relationship management. I think SoulCycle does a great job managing the relationship with this customer in store. The facilities are clean, organized and staff is super friendly. They almost always have my extended handlebars ready to go, giants like me need some special equipment. Online, I’m connected with them and continuously see their emails. I don’t read them, but don’t mind seeing their awesome logo in my inbox.
Since I follow SoulCycle, and publications like AdWeek on Linked In, I caught their first campaign this morning. I’m really curious to see how they’re going to utilize the Tribe to activate everything, if at all. Their agency, Laird + Partners did an excellent job on the branding and execution of the content. They made a really great video on what I suspect would have been a somewhat challenging budget and captured the heart of what we love about the company in the copy. So Kudos to you L+P and SoulCycle on a good first step. Cool content now exists online for people to consume.
My best guess is that a couple of things are going to happen to activate this bad boy. L+P convinced SoulCycle to pay for media on social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube and SoulCycle is going to push this into their existing social media connection points (company owned and instructors). I saw posts on Angela’s Instagram but not on Pixie’s yet? Maybe they’ve allocated some dollars to influencer marketing in exercise/fitness/motivational categories. Perhaps they’ve done some good digital PR, posts in AdWeek and AdAge is something and great for L+P, but I’ll be curious to see if “Find It” extends into health and lifestyle press. That’s really where the content needs to be seen to drive new customers into the facilities.
Ultimately, I’m very curious to see if the “Tribe” will market the content for the brand since we’re the best form of advertising to date. How does SoulCycle connect with Jamie Greenberg and convince her to post the video? They got me to write this post, but I’m not sure I count. Marketing guru’s have skewed perspective. I know they wouldn’t be silly enough to start advertising on TV. Please, SoulCycle, please tell me you haven’t cut this into :30’s and :60 ’s so you can waste your valuable marketing dollars on TV. If that somehow happened, call me. I’ll come over and piss a couple people off with my pitch on the future of marketing to prevent you from making that mistake again.
Joshua Greenberg is a producer and entrepreneur. He is the President and Executive Producer of Duck Pond. Chairman of We Are Famous and husband of beauty personality, Jamie Greenberg, behind the successful beauty blog, Jamie Makeup.
