THE CHALLENGE
Better needed to promote its leisure services to a broad audience – without making each centre start over when creating promotional collateral. I turned proposition workshop findings into a flexible messaging system that changed by audience, location and channel.
Better operates gyms, pools and other community leisure facilities across the UK. As a social enterprise, it reinvests its surplus in the communities it serves. The more effectively it attracts people, the more value it can return locally.
The thing is, there’s no single Better customer. Or single reason to visit. So any promotional wording had to speak to everyone from committed gym-goers and families to children learning to swim – as well as to first-time class-goers, and even potential new recruits.
Our work also had to help Better compete, on a carefully controlled production budget, with private leisure providers.
THE SOLUTION
I worked with Better’s marketing team and subject specialists, drilling down into the value proposition findings unearthed through face-to-face workshops.
My job was to turn those findings into an adaptable creative system: an extensive messaging matrix organised around different audiences, services, needs and benefits.
The central thought was already hiding in the name. Better could mean better health, confidence, flexibility, value or belonging for an individual – not forgetting better social and financial outcomes for the wider community.
So I wrote modular headlines and supporting copy that could be mixed and matched with imagery and tailored by region, centre and offer.
The system was designed to work across outdoor advertising, web banners, in-centre screens, radio adverts and other promotional formats. We also adapted it for local hiring managers.
THE OUTCOME
Once finished, the messaging matrix became the foundation of a practical, flexible toolkit designed to help centre managers assemble locally relevant campaigns without commissioning assets from scratch. It created variety without sacrificing consistency, and made a limited production budget work harder.
The discovery work had a second life, too: recorded interviews from the project with subject matter experts later helped inform a refresh of Better’s corporate website, which I also worked on.
This assignment brought together two sides of my experience: the discipline to build scalable content systems, and the conceptual instinct developed during my earlier career as an advertising creative.