A Healthy Brand

With her Experience Life blueprint in hand, Gerasimo had her initial sit-down with Akradi. From the outset, Gerasimo reports, her convention-busting magazine was a natural fit for his category-redefining business model. “He’s been a really consistent evangelist for the magazine since I started,” she says.

Today, Gerasimo is editor-in-chief of a rare breed, on many levels—a membership magazine that’s not intended to be a promotional tool; a health and fitness magazine that doesn’t peddle pumped-up pecs and secrets to better sex; and a newsstand magazine that prioritizes its consumers over those consuming its advertising space.

“This is a resource that’s intended to provide trusted information from a trusted source,” says John Reilly, Life Time’s vice president of corporate business. “We have a discerning readership base that’s highly educated and highly engaged, so we’re always trying to be authentic. To treat it any other way, we fear, would hurt the brand as opposed to benefit the brand.”

The Brand Within the Brand

Indeed, Experience Life serves the larger Life Time Fitness brand as an educational tool. “That’s really where the magazine fits from our healthy-way-of-life vision and mission,” Reilly says. “The education component of achieving a healthy way of life is about helping members put their goals and objectives into the context of their everyday lives. So the idea was, ‘How can we help our members get even smarter about their health and fitness needs, so they have an even greater experience with Life Time Fitness?’”

“In the health and fitness industry,” Gerasimo explains, “the biggest problem is attrition. People join clubs and they leave clubs relatively quickly. Not only is it expensive but, on a larger level, the health and fitness industry is just so rife with that tendency to say, ‘Do this thing or that thing and all your problems will be solved.’ And everyone knows that it doesn’t work that way.

“Almost everyone I know has had the experience where they tried to lose weight or they tried to get into shape, and they ended up feeling like a failure,” she continues. “And you don’t want people associating a sense of failure with your business or your industry. So this magazine is really about creating successes for the individual. If we can give them better advice and really inspire them, they will be successful in their goals and in their health and fitness experience, and they’ll stick around.”

That said, Experience Life has muscled out its own solid brand position amongst such heavyweight for-profit newsstand titles as Shape, Fitness, and Men’s Health. The magazine, which is produced 10 times annually—up from quarterly when Gerasimo assumed the editorship—has a circulation of 525,000 readers, roughly half of which are not Life Time Fitness members.