How Your Businesses Can Benefit From Cash Back Programs

The power of brands cannot be overestimated. Established companies and brands effectively leverage their existing IP to enter new product categories. Famed entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk believes “brands give permission to not have to stick to one product category.”

Prominent examples of companies who have used their powerful brands to expand their business in different verticals include Nintendo and Sony. Nintendo originated in creating playing cards. They steadily migrated into selling toys and entertainment, eventually coming to dominate the video game market with their games like zelda no densetsu: kamigami no triforce v1.0 and, more recently, Pokemon Go. Similarly, Sony began as a small electronics shop making tape recorders and radios. Their reputation of product quality pushed them to develop a wider range of tech products, for instance, the massively popular PlayStation.

In each of these cases, the established brand allowed for risk taking and innovation. This teaches that brands can often outlive expectations. After all, “no one thought that Sony could be a video game company, until they were.”

Perhaps no other industry does the power of brands play a bigger role than in the fitness and sports market. However, the fitness markets and sports markets have historically acted independently from each other. Save for summer camps hosted by pro teams, the business industries of sports and fitness rarely interacted. Recently, we have begun to see professional sports teams utilizing their brand power and name recognition to expand into the fitness market. A prime example of this is the Dallas Cowboys’ newest venture: Cowboys Fit.

Fitness World, Meet the Dallas Cowboys

“America’s Team” has become the leader of pro sports franchises entering the fitness space. In 2017, they launched Cowboys Fit at team headquarters in Frisco, Texas. They invite customers to ‘train like one of us,’ granting a fitness experience akin to that of Cowboys players. State of the art facilities, top level personal training, and unique services such as recovery lounges make trainees feel as if they are part of the Cowboy’s organization. This venture is extremely successful, with Cowboys Fit recently expanding into Plano.

Cowboys Fit’s success was built around three factors:

1. Sports-Related Service– The impact of professional sports teams is immeasurable. Cities and fanbases often revolve around the actions of their team. When those teams use their power to provide for their followers, people jump on it. There is a stronger connection to the service due to the previous personal investments people make to the team.
2. Yearlong interaction– Loyalists to the Cowboys can only see the team for four or five months out of the year. During the season, fans live and breath the Cowboys brand. When the season ends, that fervor goes in hibernation. With Cowboys Fit, customers are told they can live like a Cowboy every day of the year. They no longer have to wait for select Sundays to fully experience the brand.
3. Premium service, high demand– The Cowboys Fit gyms offer equipment and facilities that common fitness gyms cannot. Everything about the gym reflects a training facility for a professional team, including everything from sports cryotherapy recovery areas, to a full length swimming pool, and a nutrition bar. Those craving an active lifestyle have high demands for their gyms. Cowboys Fit was able to capitalize on all of those demands. Many people look at recovery techniques like cryotherapy as quite exclusive, but in truth, you can try cryotherapy in almost any city in the country, so you may want to try it out if you haven’t yet.

The San Francisco 49ers and Chicago Bears have opened similar ventures. Chicago even partnered with Mark Mastrov, the founder and former chairman of 24 Hour Fitness, to open Bears Fit.

Leverage Your Fitness Business Branding

Those three NFL teams utilized powerful brands to expand their focus. However, it is nearly impossible the wide impact of hugely popular NFL teams. For gyms, boutique fitness studios, and training academies, brands are delicate and essential. These brands typically strengthen their offerings within their familiar network. This is important to build goodwill and a strong base, and when the brand becomes strong enough, more opportunities arise for business to offer products or services to members or companies in other verticals.

For example, these new services could include:

• Business services
  • Consulting others in creating a distinct, engaging, and winning company culture
  • Offering ‘business boot camps’ with focus on various tactics, such as scaling
  • Strategizing on creative social media marketing and outreach
  • Operating elite, and modern, customer service
• Member services
  • Joining the meal subscription boom and providing fresh and healthy door-side meals
  • Teaching self-development courses in topics differing from physical activity
  • Organizing member experiences such as wellness retreats, with focus on community amongst studio members
  • Providing a subscription service of branded gear and wellness products

These are only a few ideas that would allow for fitness brands to offer additional value to their network, while still staying true to who they are.

Brands are the lifeblood of businesses. Iconic brands do not become so overnight. It takes many years of innovation and dedication. In order to expand and grow, companies often widen their product focus. Nintendo and Sony began by perfecting one initial product, and then transferring their brand attractiveness to new products. The Cowboys placed their brand on a top-level fitness gym. No one expected those companies to make those moves, but they did. The most successful business and brands are the ones that profit on the unexpected.

Youth sports play a huge role in these areas, and will continue to help develop these type of character traits and skills, giving kids an effective foundation for future development. While running a company or holding a government position isn’t a “game”, the principles behind it working in any business can likely be found in friendly competition.

How Youth Sports Can Position a Child for Future Success

The Social Aspect

In order to achieve anything as a leader, getting along with people is essential. Sports takes this a few steps further and uses instinctual psychology to win. Consider that when a child plays on a sports team, they have to learn how to interact with fellow teammates to accomplish scoring.

This also includes beating an opponent, in a civilized way. Teaching ethical youth sports is important because it enhances how kids go about communicating effectively with not only a teammate, but also an opponent.

These are skills they can use for life while still gaining the benefits of physical activity for their health. It also allows them to get involved in new sports, all whilst working with the different equipment that each activity has to offer, such as soccer nets and hockey sticks, (click here to find out more about each one). This, in itself, allows them to broaden their horizons when it comes to trying and establishing new skills.

Volunteerism

Being a good leader may require doing volunteer work to get started in life. Recent reports show that those who participated in youth sports were more apt to do volunteer work and give to charities. This report indicates the volunteerism trait continued more than 50 years after playing sports as a student. Youth sports shows how you have to work as a team to achieve a positive outcome, an important component of many volunteer opportunities.

Taking Risks & Making Decisions

Leaders in challenging positions often have to take a few risks to make an effective decision. Sports provide opportunities for a young athlete to become a team captain and take on complicated strategies to make a winning play.

Of course, this is going to involve team opinion to weigh the options. Situations involving a risky play to win a game provide kids with a scenario they’ll encounter in the working world later in life. As we’ve sometimes seen in sports, having the courage to go for it all in the final quarter can bring surprising wins.

Developing Friendly Competition

To become an effective leader, the future generation has to realize competition is at every turn. Sports help kids remove any fear of competition they may have. They need to learn how to master competitiveness in order to get jobs and move up in their careers.

For leadership positions, competition is often more fierce, particularly when moving into the role of a leader in the first place. Allowing athletes the opportunity to work their way up to becoming a team leader can play a role in this development as well.

Providing Discipline

A student is going to learn quickly that in order to succeed at a sport, they need discipline and self-understanding. A coach should teach an athlete the discipline needed to achieve a certain skill. But a great coach will teach an athlete discipline to the point that they can recognize their own strengths and weaknesses, then put their nose to the grind until they perfect those weaknesses.

Kids cannot become future leaders without seeing what their own skills are and developing them through hard work and practice. And seeing their fellow teammates doing the same can inspire them to become more motivated to reach the top.