Martin Pazzani
About Martin Pazzani
Martin Pazzani has persuaded more people to join a fitness club than everyone in this room, combined.
As Chief Marketing Officer for Bally Total Fitness and Crunch, he created the most successful campaign in fitness industry history, a turnaround that added 1 million new members in a 12-month period, and became a Harvard Business School case study. And the biggest lesson from that experience was that even the best marketing and promotions in the world cannot save a company that is operationally and financially unsound.
He went from Bally to 24 Hour Fitness as a strategy and marketing advisor, where he realized that the future of fitness was not in the mass market, big box sector but rather in a more personal, differentiated, and specialized approach which led him to connect with Dan and Cody at the FAI.
With 40 years of business experience, he's worked across six continents in advertising, marketing consulting, spirits and wines, the music industry, financial services, automotive, fast food, and more. Also, he’s a TED Speaker, and the author of "Secrets of Aging Well: GET OUTSIDE," based on his escapades hiking and climbing 100,000,000 uphill steps across 7 continents, over 50 years and his contention that hiking is not only the Fountain of Youth but possibly the best brain fitness activity available.
For the last ten years he's been a serial entrepreneur and his passion is the startup called Activate Brain and Body that is focused on the brain and body fitness of the age 45+ population, where their mission is to reinvent the fitness business as upstream preventive healthcare and radically improve the trajectory of aging. And after ten years of research, trials, pivots, and ups and downs, they are launching the first of many locations in Cincinnati in September.
Our Journey From FAI Summit #1 to Today, And What Comes Next
It’s easy to get lost when you don’t know where you started and can’t see where you’re going. This talk will be a guide to the past, present and future of fitness. We’ll look at the fitness business with a very critical and historical eye, identify issues that have held it back from being a respected part of the healthcare equation, and discuss what will need to be done to reposition the business as preventive healthcare. Entrepreneurs will play the key role in this transformation since the large, mainstream companies are prisoners of their existing business models, their often untrustworthy brands, and they inability to innovate or adapt easily to a changing environment. The future of fitness belongs to a new generation of fitness companies.
Objectives:
1 - To provide ‘big picture’ context of where the fitness industry came from, where it is now, and where it is going.
2 - To reinforce the market opportunity with the age 50+ consumer
3 - To review decades of insider research and insight that create big opportunities for entrepreneurs
4 - To identify to these areas of opportunity and point you in the right direction.
