'Tech product campaigns fall short when it comes to emotion': How we made Life Fitness's Symbio branding

Earlier this year, American fitness company Life Fitness unveiled Symbio, its brand new commercial fitness line. The company teamed up with UK marketing agency Syn, to create a strong brand for the new products, designed to promote Life Fitness's innovation with sensory-driven technologies and biometric personalisation.

We caught up with Syn's group account director Adam Clark and creative lead Graeme Baker to learn about the process and challenges of creating the branding for an entirely new product line. For more design deep dives, take a look at the rest of our How we Made series.

What was the brief and the problem that needed solving? 

Adam: To define and create a campaign to launch a new-to-market product range that will reposition Life Fitness as the innovator in the industry. A super exciting brief to get stuck into as the sky was the limit to really drive and change perception within the industry.

What was your Campaign Strategy?

Graeme: We started by workshopping the ask with Life Fitness’ global marketing team. We wanted to interrogate the brief and get to what made the product unique in the market, and what it meant to the wider Life Fitness business. Through these sessions, we discovered that the product was much more than a simple NPD, instead it was their new ‘F1’ moment. Symbio had been in development for over 10 years internally and was the result of the company's expert product and innovation teams working together to create something simply because it could be done.

We realised that we needed to tell an innovation story while creating an emotional connection with the audience. Tech-focussed product campaigns normally fall short when it comes to emotion as they are too focused on the facts, rather than feelings. We developed the strategy with this in mind, based on the idea of fusion and connection.

Tell us about the creative development

The first thing was to create a name for the product series. ‘Symbio’ was born from the natural process of symbiosis, but between body and machine instead of natural organisms. A reference to the bio-mechanically designed equipment and the intelligent sensory feedback that the range provides.

The campaign itself was developed to tell a more emotive human and machine story about connection while highlighting the elevated experience the product features deliver. Our creative direction focuses on how an unparalleled premium feel fuses with advanced sensory-driven technologies to deliver the ultimate fitness experience. Future-leaning art direction and premium, stripped-back design elevates the campaign's key visuals, while an emotive sensory-driven story arc immerses the audience in the workout.

Tell us about production and delivery

Due to the next-generation nature of the product, we wanted our set to appear at the edge of reality rather than a standard fitness setting. So we looked for a studio set that we could transform and control the conditions. We illustrated fusion and connection through a series of in-camera and digital VFX across motion and stills photography throughout a 5-day shoot. Our story moves from warm-up to cardio-max, to mirror the workout experience. The ultimate expression of cardio fitness is realised through dynamic visuals, audio and editing.

After the shoot, we took the assets through post-production for both motion and stills. Crafting the grade and overall look, along with some heavy processing work to create the futurist look we wanted. For stills, we worked extensively in retouching to craft shots by compositing together image stacks to capture the lighting and atmosphere on set. We explored the best way to represent the concept of connection we used backlit long exposures along with standard exposure flash exposures to give us an emotive creative expression of the campaign story. For motion we had to craft the grade and consider that the lighting and exposure would need to evolve, there was a challenge here to be able to exaggerate practical treatments on set and create a smooth and premium overall finish. 

We then executed a fully integrated campaign, starting with a 3D focussed teaser film then moving onto US and European pre-launch activations and then into full campaign expression and guidelines. Creating executions for digital, social, OOH, in-facility and everywhere in between to empower the global brand to go-to-market. An explorative product landing page was also developed for the website which featured interactive 3D models amongst website-specific motion content. Omnichannel expressions and content ideas for the campaign were also created and documented to give informative and inspirational guidance to global markets to activate the Symbio campaign in local regions. This was all then handed over to Life Fitness to work with their in-house teams and channel agencies for further asset rollout and execution.

What do you think of the finished process? is the client pleased with it?

Adam: From my perspective, the end result of months of hard work from both brand and agency has really landed home what can be achieved together, when everyone is aligned on the vision.

Our target was the mid-premium segment (more so premium) and Symbio delivers across the board on this. From the aesthetic to the customer purchasing experience and across digital channels, everything drives toward that high-end experience.

At every touch point through the campaign to date - from concepting, to shoot production, tease phases, to activation and now launch, the global clients that we have worked with have been nothing but positive. Working closely with the Life Fitness marketing, product and engineering team to bring their latest creation to life, we’ve taken all areas of inspiration to really make Symbio reimagine fitness. We even had tears at the shoot that we’d exceeded initial expectations!

Some comments from Life Fitness:

"The name Symbio is born from the concept of Symbiosis. We aimed to blur the lines between exerciser and equipment, creating a symbiotic synergy between human and machine to benefit the mind and body in pursuit of the ultimate cardio fitness experience,” said Harry Damen, Marketing Director, Health Clubs from Life Fitness. "This range represents a harmonious fusion of advanced biomechanics, purposeful design, and personalised experiences, elevating the cardio fitness journey to new heights."

Paul Taylor, Director of Product Design at Life Fitness went on to say, “Syn did a brilliant job of translating Symbio's product design vision into an engaging campaign that resonates with our customers and exercisers on an intellectual and emotional level. We couldn't have chosen a better partner.”

Syn have played a pivotal role in bringing the Symbio vision to life. From conceptualising the name 'Symbio' to crafting the overarching proposition of 'Fitness Reimagined,' Syn's collaboration with Life Fitness has led to a comprehensive multi-channel campaign.