Creating a New Balance

Part of Richard Branson's Virgin empire, Virgin Active Fitness Clubs is the world's first global branded health and fitness facility. Founded in 1997, the group entered Singapore in late 2013. By then, Virgin Active was operating 269 clubs across South Africa, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the U.K. and Australia with over 1.2 million members.

The Singapore club is centrally located at Raffles Place in the heart of the CBD. With 33,000 square feet across three floors of a prime high rise office complex, One Raffles Place, it is by far the largest fitness facility in Singapore. Comprehensive facilities include some of the world's most advanced equipment, proprietary features not found elsewhere, meeting rooms, a café, sleep pods, a lounge and free WiFi throughout.

Unlike other Virgin Active clubs, Virgin Active Singapore is premium priced, with a higher monthly subscription than other fitness-related enterprises in Singapore. Local awareness of the Virgin brand and its distinctive iconoclastic values is relatively low; specific awareness of Virgin Active's concept of of activeness and over-arching theme of living happily ever active effectively non-existent.

Our challenge was to build brand awareness and generate membership.

Fitness today is associated at least as much with a fashionable, aspirational, lifestyle as it is with health and well-being. It is part of the lifestyle of those who aspire to be at the cutting edge of contemporary up-market attitudes and behaviour, with a proper balance between work and leisure.

What if we associated Virgin Active with aspirational values and achieving balance?
This prompted the solution. Our idea is about balance - the balance between different aspects of fitness, the balance between lifestyle attitudes and fitness aspirations, the balance between doing and being.

It features different aspects of Virgin Active linked in pairings such as "Hide and Seek", "Spin and Soak" and "Look and Feel". Each aspect is presented individually, coming together in a central summation which leads into the Virgin Active theme, "Live happily ever active".

The copy is tongue-in-cheek, telling the facts with wit, a human focus and sense of purpose that give the target audience the satisfaction of "getting it" and being in the know. This underlines the iconoclastic feeling that adds such power, credibility and involvement to the Virgin brand.