Case study 3: Edinburgh Leisure – Feel Good Factor

Twice a year Edinburgh Leisure mounts a full-scale membership recruitment campaign for its health and fitness division. There is a choice of literally hundreds of private health and leisure clubs and gyms across the city.

Edinburgh Leisure manages the Council-owned facilities and even though the quality of equipment is as good as and often better than the private clubs and the choice of facilities far wider in perception terms it has to work hard to gain an equal footing with this competition. So, it needs these recruitment campaigns to overcome negative perceptions and sell hard. Especially when the target is 1500 new members in a month.

Time and again these targets are exceeded and September 2007 was no different. However the message was a new, fresh and highly inclusive one. With a brief to take a more campaigning stance and to avoid overtly body image conscious work, on the back of the most miserable summer in living memory we came up the “the feel good campaign”. This involved radio advertising and venue posters with our client extending the concept into a parade through Edinburgh’s City Centre, followed by a carnival in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens. This literally stopped the traffic!

And the campaign as a whole stopped the competition in its tracks too. Response was so good that the original target of 1500 was blown out of the water with 1686 new members in total.

A bit of a feel good factor all round, then.

 

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