Vision- A stance or opinion the company takes on the world around it.
Love. Hate. Jealousy. These feelings are attached to strong emotions. When a company or a person can stir up a market with such strong feelings the company begins to have engaging community and a platform can be built.
This is where CrossFit excels in. Their vision is to change people's lives by using fitness as the focal point. The company's stance is clear. They have no problem standing up to traditional dogmas in the fitness industry that say otherwise. You can see it as a positive or negative but one thing is crystal clear- they are a polarizing force. And because of this, their tribe will fight tooth and nail for them. And that's something very important about strong and effective brands.
This is not to say they stay static but they organically change over time to move the narrative depending on their position in the market place. They are not quickly changing their stance based on public perception but building their vision based on their own opinions.
On the flip side, let's take a look at a company that displays signs of a unfocused vision. We're going to at The Box. This is a magazine that really brings content to the mainstream regarding CrossFit. It is a magazine that emulates the style of Muscle and Fitness but has the central focus on CrossFit.
But their branding falters straight out the gate. Look at the cover of the December 2014 issue. On the cover they have the Fittest Women in the World, Camille Leblanc-Bazinet, with a poorly constructed photoshop job. You can easily tell her mid section has been air brushed and reshaped. The magazine was created and designed to cater to an audience about natural health and wellness . But having the FITTEST WOMEN IN THE WORLD photoshopped really shows a hypocritical stance on the matter. The meltdown of their social media department regarding the debacle was spectacular. If you saw their Facebook feed they had approx. five times the amount of engagement from that one post than the other posts that quarter. (I recently checked to see if that post is still on the site and they removed it).
You saw clearly how they missed out on living up to their vision. Without having a laser focus on vision, the magazine is viewed only as a vehicle to push merchandise to the CrossFit community.
Sidenote:
Kim Kardashian has a net worth in 2014 of $85 million dollars. Let that sink in for a minute. $85 million dollars as a net worth for a person that became famous from a C-list R&B artist. Add in being a spawn of one of the socialists, Par Hilton, an E! network deal and Bam!
I would argue that Kim Kardashian might have 2:1 ratio of haters, but yet they fuel her brand, more attention to the masses and this women is making bank. Just to show you the proxitiy effect, Khloe Kardashian, the youngest of the trio of the Kardashian sisters, made $20 million last year which included just tweeting about products from her social media account and retweeting information regarding Kim Kardashian's line. She saw a clear pass to riches and transformed her brand from reality antics to straight cash.
