The Client

Les Mills is firmly placed as one of the world’s leading fitness brands. Since first pioneering the concept of group workouts nearly four decades ago, they have continued to drive the fitness sector forward year on year.

Millions of fitness enthusiasts work out with them every week and they have over 120,000 Instructors who support them in advancing commercial and home workouts globally. As a brand, they strive to work alongside and support their customers with member experience at the heart of everything they do. Most importantly, they seek to inspire future generations into a lifelong love of exercise.

The Challenge

Les Mills wanted to exhibit their brand leadership by sharing their experience and knowledge to try and solve some of the fitness industries key challenges.

They had also identified that many of their customers knew a limited amount about their business and the group exercise programmes they provide.

With this in mind and with FIBO, Europe’s largest fitness-based trade show a key potential activation point, the team approached us to support them in doing something different. They wanted to create an on stand experience to educate their customers on who Les Mills are and how they provide ongoing support.

They also wanted to develop a brand new and exciting thought leadership event for their customers that went way beyond a typical B2B conference.

Fit Business Live

We supported the Les Mills Global marketing team in developing the strategy, managing the build up and executing their very first Fit Business Live event in Cologne. Together we developed a fast paced and thought provoking event, which was a cut above a typical B2B conference.

This exclusive thought leadership event included over 200 of their key European customers. The event provided insights from within and outside of the fitness sector. The theme that underpinned the first event was motivation. Rather than simply focusing on how to motivate their members to get fit, speakers also covered the topics of leading motivational teams, member retention, general industry trends and how group fitness and personal training could better interlink.

You can watch a selection of the event videos we created here and below.

FIBO

At FIBO 2017 Les Mills wanted to tell their story. Many of their customers had limited knowledge of their brand heritage and experience. They also wanted to highlight their brand leadership and the various activities they undertake to support their customers.

With this in mind, we developed a stand with 4 clear zones to take their customers on a journey. This allowed their team to explain more about things such as their heritage and the group exercise programmes they provide whilst taking them around their stand.

The 4 key zones were:

The Result

We worked in partnership with the Les Mills Global marketing team for 5 months to support the strategy, development and delivery for both their FIBO trade show stand and also ‘Fit Business Live’.

The on stand journey at FIBO supported improved engagement with their customers as well as providing a method to document the level of interaction on the stand. Due to its success, Fit Business Live will now be rolled out globally to a number of Les Mills’ key markets and is planned for China, the Netherlands, USA and New Zealand.

Working with Brandwave on our tradeshow presence at FIBO 2017 and our first ever Thought Leadership Event, Fit Business Live, was an absolute pleasure. They were by our side from concept through to execution and helped us to seamlessly create reality from what was a brand new and challenging concept.

Their expertise in project management, events, internal communications, speaker engagement and procurement and planning was helpful from day one, and their attendance at the event brought their expertise to life in real time. We are a complex organisation, with a headquarters in New Zealand, with many stakeholders from different countries to manage on a weekly basis, but the team managed this effortlessly and professionally and as a client I was proud to have them by my side as a valued partner in any internal meeting and of course at the event itself.

Charlotte Dewhurst

GLOBAL MARKETING DIRECTOR – B2B AND B2I, LES MILLS INTERNATIONAL