A few words on marketing

Recently I received some promotional materials from a Yoga gym in Hong Kong. It structures its classes in a very customer-focused way. It offers Destress yoga class, Slimming yoga class, Prenatal yoga class, Postnatal yoga class, Golf yoga class (those who can afford to play golf certainly has more money to spend on leisure) and Core yoga class (core yoga meaning training one's core abdominal muscles - directly targeting at Pilates as competitor!). Together with photos of a few young (and hot!) male Indian trainers, I can see a good marketing campaign targeting at the young female professionals - the biggest spenders in Hong Kong for personal care and healing (I wonder whether they will have a Detox yoga class next season...).

At the same time, I noticed a lineage tai-chi teacher in USA said in his blog that he charges for only five US dollars per lesson and still finds it hard to get a salary for himself. This sifu teachers in the classic way, and I'm sure he has many good things to teach. Apart from the fact that the US economy is down, I believe it is also related to the issue of marketing.

Marketing doesn't only mean packaging (and having "hot" coaches!). The training programs offered are to be tailor-made to specific segment, understanding their needs and designing a program suitable to their needs (instead of just following the sequence or materials that the teacher's teacher passes along, with the proud objective of keeping the practice in the good old traditional way).

I'm sure many tai-chi teachers can learn a lot from the Yoga Gym that I mentioned, not necessarily targeting the same segment nor doing it the same way. Creativity is needed here.

A yoga gym's promotional photo