The self-styled luxury fitness company Equinox rolled out a new US brand campaign in January 2022 called ‘Life Is The Luxury’ which underscores the brand’s core messaging while simultaneously offering lessons learned during the pandemic.
Initially launched in the USA, Equinox’s ‘Life Is The Luxury’ focuses on driving home a set of key benefits of fitness clubs rather than the home workout which became so common during the pandemic by emphasizing comfort, convenience and sense of community.
The campaign is built around a set of images, clips and themes not commonly associated with the word ‘luxury’. Indeed, rather than promoting ideas associated with showy, opulent material wealth, the creative features athletes in rough, barren terrain pushing themselves to their physical limits.
To millions of viewers who have spent much of the past two years stuck inside small apartments, making do with claustrophobic living room workouts, these scenes of athletes running full-tilt through pristine wilderness and speed-climbing up sheer rock faces are likely to pack a powerful psychological punch — potentially inspiring them to return to a club like Equinox.
The campaign launched on 13 January with an extensive set of short and snappy creative executions running across the brand’s digital and social platforms led by Facebook and Instagram (where it rolled out no fewer than 19 pieces of content)
The creative reinforces the brand’s belief that fitness isn’t a habit, but rather a mindset and a lifestyle.
The campaign title is a tweaked extension to the company’s previous ‘It’s Not Fitness, It’s Life” slogan which the company originally introduced back in 2004 and which communicates the brand’s umbrella aims of blurring the boundaries between wellness, exercise and, well, everything else.
“The focus is really to capture what Equinox feels like through these very visceral, elemental points of view that are all in these scenes across different landscapes in nature,” says Will Mayer, vice president of creative, executive creative director at Equinox. “But then the real goal is to expand that through stories of members, and through many different forms; events, activations, everything throughout the year.”
Mayer’s team filmed the new ad campaign on location in Durango, Mexico. The company recruited a roster of athletes for the shoot, including Gracie Carvalho (a model and Muay Thai fighter) and Loic Mabanza (a choreographer and lead dancer for Beyoncé).
“We realized that a lot of members rushed back as soon as mass restrictions dropped, just for the feeling of being in our spaces. And that was something we never realized when we were in the middle of COVID,” continued Mayer. “But we didn’t realize how needed our clubs were to a lot of our members… a lot of our members use us basically to get passion out of their experiences. And the notion we played with is: if you give more passion, you get more life. You get a more vivid life, you get a more clear life, you get a more happy and healthy life. A lot of what we’re trying to do now is just really lean on the life element. It’s much less about like the core physical product and much more about life and the lifestyle we create.”
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This campaign rolled out during a period in which many Americans are considering whether their switch to home workouts during Covid-19 is a permanent move or whether to head out back to the gym and, unsurprisingly, it certainly comes down in favour of the latter.
After a lengthy period of forced closures and consumers reluctant to be out and about in public places, the US vaccine programme over the last year has seen fitness clubs and gyms across the country re-open their doors to members.
After Equinox reopened, Mayer said he began to notice members showing a renewed passion and vigour for exercise and for everything that Equinox had to offer – above all, a healthier lifestyle and a sense of community (two things which many people struggled with during the darker at-home earlier phases of the pandemic.
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