Spirit Fritsla
a COMMUNITY REBRAND project
CLIENT
Spirit Fritsla
TEAM
Team of six designers of different professions
MY ROLE
Marketing Strategy, Research
YEAR
2021
“How might we present a capitvating narrative that allows for the community to grow, promote health and sense of family?”
Who was the client?
The client was a small important community-driven MMA club in a small village called Fritsla, in southern Sweden. This club was created by its owner who came to be the main contact person throughout the project. It started out as a kickboxing establishment to teach his friend how to do it, but it evolved into something larger. Now it is a tight-knit community with a focus on teaching and learning MMA as a family. The most important thing for the founder of the club was that it was not his club, but "our club", being together in a family-like community where you feel like you're coming home as soon as you enter through the doors.
But what is stopping him to achieve his vision with the club is time, resources, and competition. He wants to maintain the family feel, to be true to the roots of MMA and still grow as a modern club in a relatively small town with about 50-100% (about 20-25 people). This is where we come in. We were a team of six people, who created a new social media and marketing strategy to gain more attraction through spreading the message, through storytelling and putting emphasis on the core values of the club that makes it stand out from their competitors.
The objective
Our goal in this project is to create a community within Spirit Fritsla where everyone is warmly welcome. We want everyone to feel like home when they are entering Spirit Fritsla’s doors. Everyone deserves to strengthen both their physical and mental health to get a better life. We also want to attract new members with a focus on more females to the club to get a more diverse core group.
Spirit Fritsla needs our help to reach out to new members and let people know about their organization. Because of this, we chose to focus our strategy on telling the story of Spirit Fritsla’s warm and welcoming atmosphere through their brand identity and social media content.
What was my role?
The team consisted of six eager UX designers who all worked in what we liked to call parallel unison to ensure efficiency and quality. This meant that we had internal design sprints to pitch concepts, present takes and standpoints to each other and to the client. Once this was created and a green was given to the team, we moved forth with takes on the style, execution and takes on the material provided with the approved path in mind. I was therefor involved in everything from client meetings, conceptualisation through low fidelity sketches, UI prototyping and user testing with the contact person within Ericsson. That being said however, I took an extra responsibility over the visual elements of the UI to ensure a fluent design that remained responsive in the mock-up demonstration in the end.
Why are we doing this?
"The most important part within Spirit Fritsla is not the fight itself, nor is it about the tension between me and my sparring partner. It's about me and myself"
Spirit Fritsla’s goals are to create a community for their club members where they are all family and run the club together. They want to help their members develop strength both physically and mentally. They need our help to reach out to new members and let people know about their brand. Because of this, we chose to focus our strategy on telling the story of Spirit Fritsla’s welcoming and warm atmosphere working on their brand identity and social media content.
How are we doing this?
By reflecting the warm, welcome and including community to social media the reach of new members is short. Being active on social media and pushing out content several times a week - creates a bond and increases relations between existing members and most importantly raises awareness and interest for potential members. It is important for Spirit Fritsla to push out content on social media that is in line with their value proposition.
The purpose here is for the content to be entertaining but also to create empathy and a deeper understanding for the club so that our target audience can connect and build interest.
What are we doing?
The strategy that we’ve created for this project will result in more potential members. One of our main objectives is to get more women into the club for a more diverse core group. Moreover, our work with the social media platform accounts on Instagram and Facebook will result in more viewers, which in turn leads to more potential members and a more professional outside view of Spirit Fritsla as a club. Another aim is to clarify the value proposition of the club and in that way distinct Spirit Fritsla from their competitors.
Our Hero
At the heart of every organization is a story and a hero. It’s critical to know what attributes define the inner character of the hero. Storytelling is about the higher purpose of why our hero exists and why we should care. This hero is, as described before, the owner himself with a passion and drive to grow the community in a healthy way. THIS is what we wanted to highlight in order to make the community feel more welcoming.
Social Media Strategy
Being active on social media pushing out content several times a week creates a bond and increases relations between existing members and most importantly raises awareness and interest for potential new members. It is important for Spirit Fritsla to push content on social media that is in line with their value proposition and that reflects their community.
A new Facebook and Instagram page to reach out to both the community and get in touch with surrounding people is a huge step in the right direction. The content for their community should be entertaining, but also create empathy and a deeper understanding for the club so that our target audience can connect and build interest.
Suggested content categories:
Quotes - short lines of text is related to the community
Techniques - Pictures and videos on how to practice different moves
History - Showcasing the history of the club and their in-depth knowledge
Outcome
The strategy that we’ve created will help Spirit Fritsla grow their community. Their updated social media profiles and their new website will not only help the organization stay modern in time. This would also attract new members with our suggested content and keep the club’s current audience interested in the social media strategy that we developed in this project for the first month as a template for them to continue to work from.
In a more long-term perspective, a homepage/website has also been created for Spirit Fritsla. There are many benefits to having their own website;
The website could be connected to both Instagram and Facebook, where visitors can go and quickly sign up for a training session within seconds.
Second of all, the homepage will appear on search engines that everyone is using on a daily basis.
Third, it will be easier to reach them and come in contact with the club directly without having to go through social media.
"I would like to give you credit to really work WITH the client instead of for him. You walked the extra mile and really went in there and worked with him."
- Project Supervisor, Anders Hallberg
Storytelling, family and our hero
The project all centered around the sense of belonging, which in turn meant that we had to increase the community and health aspects of it by washing off the stigma of fighting and physical violence by focusing on that physical health and activity also lead to psychological health. Our hero, the founder of the organisation, and his vision of belonging and community while pursuing health according to old traditions is what we wanted to focus on as it instantly captivated us.
My takeaways
My personal takeaways from this project all comes down to adjusting my values and thoughts about organisations of this kind. I have never really been into physical sports and more into precision and focus, but this really served as an eye opener for me as I delved into the core values of this club. It also allowed me to refresh the ways of running social campaigns in order to gain tractions, by this time focusing on an area that I before this project was unaware of the main philosophies. This was the main reason why we decided to work as tight as we did with our hero, because we wanted his vision and thoughts to be put front and centre, to make his vision, ideas and the traditions justice.