Brand Study: The Gamification of Working Out - CrossFit.

During the early part of 2020 when Covid-19 was spreading all over the country and closing gyms and other businesses I “took a break” from working out. In reality I used it as an excuse to avoid going to the gym or doing any sort of at home workout in general to try and stay fit and healthy. As months went by I realized I lacked motivation to get back into the gym and really get back into a healthy lifestyle. Now I was by no means unhealthy or needing to fix my life habits, but personally I wanted to maintain some fitness in my life. 

Now enter two friends of mine who have been doing CrossFit for about a year and are asking me to try it just about every week since they started. I, like most people, am skeptical of CrossFit because of the things I have heard about like injuries people have gotten or watching the way they do pull ups. Not to mention the steep price tag of a monthly gym membership seems almost insane when you can just go to your local gym for a third of the price and do the same workouts…or so I thought.

Come August of 2020 I have no motivation to workout, my friends are constantly asking me to go try out CrossFit, and I’ve run out of excuses not to go. So I pay the $50 for the 101 class and try it out. From then on I become hooked and as I seemingly become addicted to this brand called CrossFit I realize that this seems to happen to a lot of people, I mean that’s why the brand is worth more than $4 billion dollars as of 2016. As someone who works in the marketing industry it really got me thinking what is it about this brand, this idea, that gets people so excited. 

Here’s what I think really makes CrossFit so unique, it takes something as simple as working out and turns it into a game, a competition. But it isn’t a one size fits all competition, they’ve done such a great job of using scales to let people choose a weight or movement that works for them and then still be able to “compete” with their fellow gym mates. 

What is Gamification anyways? Well it’s pretty much what it sounds like, putting game elements into non game contexts. The concept employs many techniques commonly found in games like competition, a point system, rankings, going up in levels, etc. Naturally the idea is that in the same way that games like basketball or monopoly spur social interaction and fuel a sense of accomplishment, you can do the same with some other entity like working out.

For most people working out is so hard to be motivated to do because it’s really boring. You go to a gym, you look for a bench or squat rack or machine and hope no one else is using it. Then when you do find a spot you’re constantly avoiding eye contact with the dude next to you lifting far more than you can and flexing in the mirror every ten seconds. There’s a huge barrier to entry for many people and I don’t blame them for not wanting to go, I even built my own mini gym in my garage for my wife and her friends to be able to have a place they can workout together and at least have some privacy. 

Anyways, the point is CrossFit gyms or boxes are different in that they create a healthy atmosphere balancing competition, supportiveness, and challenge for their members. By gamifying work outs there is some sort of psychological effect that makes you want to push harder than you might normally at a gym. You have people cheering you on and your friends to race against the clock with. I’ve personally never been someone who is naturally competitive but watching something like the CrossFit Games just get’s me going. I think, “I can do that” maybe not as fast or lift as heavy, but I can go to the gym right now and do that exact same workout against my friends and we can see how we stack up.

Gamification isn’t anything new in the marketing world, in fact brands like Nike and Under Armor use gamification for many of their athletic products to get people motived in the same way CrossFit does. However I think the difference is community built around the gamification. The community of CrossFit is itself a huge selling point to the brand, I mean people don’t call it a cult for no reason. People seem too nice at times, but really it’s just from experiencing the benefits of a healthy lifestyle and wanting to share that with other people. And as a brand what more could you want from the people that use your product? To get someone from knowing about it, to trying it, to becoming an evangelist of it is nothing short of the ideal customer journey for any company.

CrossFit has been around for over 10 years now and gone under new ownership in the past year but I can only see things going up from here. With an ever increasing pool of athletes who’ve developed huge followings on social media and bloggers basically creating their own YouTube shows around the brand, CrossFit is here to stay and I think the next big sport.

Since getting into CrossFit I’ve been looking at ways to be apart of the community more so using my talents as a designer. One idea I had was creating a social media app concept that lets you share workouts and compete with your followers. Click below to see the concept, let me know what you think!