CrossFit’s chief marketing officer Jenna Hauca knows it is special to work for a brand whose mission is to help people lead healthier lives.
“I’ve been really fortunate in my career to work for very mission-driven companies that I feel super aligned with,” says Hauca. “At CrossFit, our mission is really empowering people to own their health. Every day, I get to make a little bit of an impact and make the world a healthier, fitter place.”
CrossFit has three primary business units – a network of global gyms (11,500 gyms in more than 150 countries on all seven continents!), an EDU business of 100,000 trained globally coaches hosting around 5,000 seminars a year training CrossFit coaches and the CrossFit Games sport business.
“CrossFit’s competitive season kicks off every year around February with the CrossFit Open, which – fun fact – is the world’s largest participatory sporting event,” says Hauca. “We had about a quarter million people participate this year – anyone in the community can participate. Then, through the stages of the season, we whittle the competitive field down to about 30 elite men and women who compete at the CrossFit Games, which are coming up in Albany the first weekend of August.”
Prior to joining CrossFit, Hauca spent six years at the gym chain Barry’s Bootcamp. Brand Innovators caught up with Hauca from her office in Los Angeles to talk about how the brand shows up in culture and their media business. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about how you’re showing up in culture?
One of the things we really focus on is just the flywheel and potential life cycle of someone in the CrossFit ecosystem. We often see someone come in as a member who’s taking a class at an affiliate gym and they might then become interested in becoming a coach. Once they’re a coach, they might then be interested in becoming an affiliate owner and starting a new CrossFit gym, which is a really important part of our business.
We focus on bringing people into the fold that have a genuine passion for what we do. We are for and accessible to everyone, but we’re not necessarily for everyone. CrossFit is really hard and it definitely takes a certain type of person to want to be part of it. So we look for that self-selection of people wanting to come into the community. The best way to do that is by inspiring them and creating evangelists within our community to then bring in other folks through word-of-mouth or passion on their channels. We have our own entire endemic media ecosystem. People are so passionate they start their own podcasts and their own publications.
What is your approach to storytelling and getting the brand and also working with these people who are part of your ecosystem?
Once upon a time, the folks at CrossFit would say that CrossFit is a media company, which surprises people. They wouldn’t expect CrossFit to be a fitness company, but it really was originally a media company and it still is today. One of my main focuses since I was brought in about a year and a half ago now has been really to rev back up the media engine at CrossFit. We produce a ton of both long and short form media.
We have roughly 20 million followers across all of our social media platforms, inclusive of YouTube. What we find resonates with our audience the most is just focusing on real stories about our community, the authenticity and power of the methodology and the way that we change lives globally on a daily basis. We are truly saving lives through our methodology and celebrating the ways that it can make people fitter, healthier.
Over the past year, we’ve launched actually three different YouTube docuseries, which are all really interesting, but focusing on real stories. The first one is called Hear Their Stories.
And each episode is a feature on a different affiliate globally. We go to different countries, tell all different stories, whether it’s an adaptive athlete who maybe was in a serious car crash and opened an affiliate and now focuses on changing lives or whether it’s an ex-CrossFit Games athlete that’s opened an affiliate and now has dedicated their lives to changing or helping those in their community.
The second is called Drop In Diaries. It’s kind of like an Anthony Bourdain, Parts Unknown style tour where we have a host and we dropped her in this case into the UK to do a tour of different affiliates. She took her CrossFit level two certification course, which is one of the stages in our training. And she attended the Rogue Invitational.
The last is called Road to the Games. It’s a 10 episode series leading into the games where we feature different athletes who qualified and just spend a couple of days with them wherever they live. We know that’s what excites, inspires, and creates the type of evangelism we need to get folks speaking about CrossFit all over the world.
Going to the fitness side of the business, how is that evolving? Obviously, the integration with media seems key, but in what ways are you keeping up with the competitive landscape for working out?
One of the most important things is just to have our finger on the pulse of the consumer marketplace and what folks are looking for in a fitness solution today. If you look at Gen Z, and millennials, you really see a shift in focus from just vanity fitness to a much bigger focus on holistic health and wellness and longevity. This has been an advantage because our entire methodology has always been with nutrition as a foundation and fitness and other elements like recovery and longevity as a part of it. It’s never been just about going to the gym and working out and leaving. CrossFit is an entire lifestyle and knowing our unique positioning in the marketplace and leaning on it has been super important.
The second piece is looking at a younger audience. It’s so important to them to have purpose and to be authentic. That also lends itself well to what our brand voice has been. We recognize that we’re not for everyone and we don’t try to be. We show up exactly as we are. We focus on our values of authenticity, community, self-improvement, and find that the younger audience really gravitates to that type of messaging.
What about speaking of audiences, in what ways are you using data and customer insights to help create loyalty and connection?
We do a lot of listening and feedback surveys. We also do a lot of round tables and we even have various councils set up whether it’s our affiliates or our athletes. We’re listening to our community on a regular basis to understand what they want and what their reactions to some of the things that we’re doing are. Those insights, of course, shape what we are doing.
For example, we did a big survey to our coaches recently. There’s about 100,000 in the system with active credentials currently. They gave us feedback around a year ago that they were looking for more resources in a video format to see our seminar staff – who are the best of the best and really the best coaches in the world – giving ongoing feedback on how to coach and various tips and tricks. We reacted to that by launching a CrossFit training YouTube channel specifically to have content like that. Listening and understanding our audience has been the most important thing for us and we really prioritize it.
Can you talk about how your past experience has helped shape your perspective now in this role?
I led global marketing and digital at Barry’s for about six years. One of the most important things I learned in that role was the importance and value of community. It was never about paid marketing. It was never about broad strokes. We had a local community marketing manager in every single one of Barry’s regions – a manager in LA, in New York, in Chicago. We had about 84 studios in 14 countries. The sole job of that person who was installed in the local market was to understand the community and to build relationships with local businesses and tastemakers in the community to make sure that Barry’s was part of the local zeitgeist.
When I joined CrossFit, the very first thing I did was launch a community marketing function. It’s a bit harder at CrossFit given that we have thousands of gyms instead of dozens. So we’re operating at an entirely different type of scale. We’re still building the practice. We teach them how to fish, giving them the tools, giving them the playbooks so that if they don’t necessarily know what to do or how to build community or how to drive acquisition locally, we’re giving them some of the tools and training that they need to maximize their business.
How are you thinking about innovation at the brand?
We are investing in AI in a few different ways. Being a global country, language has been one of our biggest challenges and making CrossFit accessible to folks who don’t speak English or some of the major languages. So right now, we’re actually in the midst of a pilot with a Gen AI company to translate a lot of our video content, both marketing collateral as well as resources for owners into different languages. We’re looking at that in markets like Korea, Spain and France, which are massive growth opportunities for us.
One of the other things is surveys and listening, which are really important to us. But that’s a lot of data. And usually you find the gems in some of the open answer questions versus the multiple choice. But open answers are really hard to aggregate and pull findings from, but AI makes that extremely easy.
