Gaining enlightenment: how Pure Yoga attracted a more gender and age diverse customer to its studios
Yoga and men are two words that were rarely associated together a decade ago, but with the exercise, or practice, as practitioners call it, becoming more mainstream and less of a fad, the gender gap has become closer.
The practice has also benefited from people seeing it as a cultural trend, especially with millennials, as they are seeing health as important as wealth, compared to the previous generation.
One yoga studio that has seen an uptick in men and millennials in its classes is Pure Yoga, which according to Gary Wise, regional marketing director at Pure Group, now has a 65% female to 35% male ratio and a broader age group of members, as compared to members who were 90% female and belonged to the older generation previously.
According to Wise, this is the result of the Hong Kong-based Pure, which also runs an online yoga video platform called MyPureYoga.com, Pure Fitness, healthy food cafes called Nood food and Pure Apparel, starting yoga for all classes, which are free and held outdoors, to attract more men and a younger crowd.
It also held yoga classes for a couple of English Premier League clubs when they took their pre-season tour in Hong Kong and posted the photos of footballers in various yoga poses on its social media.
In addition, Pure started a documentary series on its social media that introduces 'masculine' guys to yoga, like telling the story of how a Cathay Pacific male pilot got into yoga for the first time.
“We have also started yoga for men classes to break the barrier of intimidation, because sometimes they find it weird to do a class when it is all women,” Wise tells The Drum at a Pure Yoga outlet in Suntec City, Singapore.
“We wanted to show that yoga is for everybody and this has been Pure's mission from the beginning, where we said yoga should not be seen as this mystical and spiritual thing, but something anyone can get into, appreciate and benefit from it.”
The former Puma marketer also pays tribute to YouTube and Instagram influencers who practice and promote yoga because they make yoga more accessible and give it a higher profile, which is also Pure’s mission. “I love working with them. We use those that actually come to Pure and it's never just about putting their faces on an ad, but telling their stories.”
“The influencers we ‘own’ are mainly our own teachers and we try to build up their individual profile by helping them with their social media platforms because they are our best ambassadors,” he adds.
In-housing
Like some brands that follow the in-housing trend, Pure prefers to build its own in-house capabilities and expertise, as it does not feel that above the line advertising is the most effective method, says Wise.
Instead, the company feels the most effective method to market itself is through its existing customers.
“In our advertising, we only use our own people because it comes from the community. The billboards in our studios are all either Pure Yoga teachers or students. We have always done that because it is more authentic and it feels more real because they have stories to tell,” explains Wise.
“Digital storytelling takes up most of our time and sometimes we do through the line advertising campaigns in Hong Kong, where we are much bigger. We also do a lot of community outreaches like outdoor classes and we have a PR-driven strategy where we get our teachers into the media and television programmes to talk about yoga.”
Focus on China and expansion plans
Pure Group welcomed a new investment partnership with private-equity firm FountainVest Partners and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan at the start of 2018.
This means that, while the company has had a sustainable growth strategy for the past 16 years, the time is ripe to accelerate growth, according to Wise. “We see a huge potential because the brand has grown strongly and now is the time to make the most use of that.”
However, Wise admits that the challenge now is to maintain quality of its classes in 22 locations in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing and Taipei, while expanding, because its teachers are assets and hiring the right ones is very difficult.
“In a way, it is getting easier because we are better known and when we open an outlet somewhere, and the teachers hear about us, they may come to us,” he explains. “However, the pool of teachers is not increasing locally, so a lot of the time we are hiring overseas like in India, US and Europe.
China is a market that Pure is keen on cracking even further as it realised that it cannot have a personal-only strategy and have to actually start selling memberships online because the Chinese millennials will only interact with something if they get all the information they need online and instantly.
“We currently only do sign-ups in person and not through our website or apps, because it is about the personal touch. However, we may start selling some of our products like Power Pack, which is a one month membership, as a gift online,” says Wise.
“We are selling it for Christmas at the moment, but next year we going to sell it on our app and third party websites. In China, we are looking at selling it on Meituan-Dianping, the Chinese version of Yelp, and on WeChat.”
Does disruptive technology have a place in yoga studios?
Artificial intelligence and virtual reality will have a role to play in getting people to try yoga in the future, but people who get into yoga want to switch off from technology, Wise notes. “It is a big thing and there will always be a resistance to let digital takeover yoga,” he says.
Instead, the Englishman believes yoga studios will make use of video to allow people to try some beginner poses online and eventually encourage them to try the classes in their studios.
“There are currently a lot of online video sites - we have our own one - because yoga is growing very fast, in Asia particularly. The biggest growth market in Asia is China and the way to grow is to get more people involved online,” he says.