(Jan, 2013 – Current) My first task as the Director of Marketing at the Personal Training Academy was to develop the company’s brand. Despite being a relatively small, new RTO based in Melbourne, the Personal Training Academy already had campuses across the country, global partnerships with leaders in the fitness industry and a well known brand ambassador, Shannan Ponton, trainer on the Australian Biggest Loser.
What PT Academy needed was a cohesive message and branding guide that appealed to a larger audience as it’s reputation in the fitness industry continued to burgeon. The meat of our rebranding strategy came about by locking our management team in a room for 3 days with the patient folks at Creative Brew to define Personal Training Academy’s brand positioning and assess our strongest points of communication with students.
The pillars of Personal Training Academy’s value to personal trainers and students are our comprehensive educators, flexible study options and the internationally renowned educators of our various courses.
From this, I worked closely with two freelance graphic designers based in Melbourne and San Francisco on the look and feel of our brand. Our work together lead to extending the green and blue swirls of PT Academy’s logo into a softer, colour gradient accentuating images of functional, dynamic movements. To express the pillars of our brand’s value we developed 3 key graphics, and later a handful of other graphics to lead our global community through our course and service offerings.
With our new brand, I was able to launch a new look for our booth at Filex 2013 and create the Fitness Evolution blog to engage thought leaders in an ever-evolving industry of health and movement. Instead of using our relationship with Shannon Ponton in the simplest format as we had been (i.e. his face and endorsement on our ads), we worked with Shannon to create a continuing education mentorship course for personal trainers to train with and further develop their careers based on the experience of Shannon’s 20 years in the industry. Extending this personalised relationship with Shannon work with Personal Training Academy, we have regular features of Shannon on our blog discussing different aspects of Effective Movement Training, his challenges and triumphs on The Biggest Loser as well as his simple joys in life: being a new father, surfing and boxing.
Our work in these particular aspects of our brand development and outreach was then extended out to our social distribution channels, SEO strategy, and fully utilising our CRM initiatives. With this rapidly growing company that values innovation in health and learning while extolling the virtues of community, my biggest job in this position was to have fun and find way to fully express how awesome PT Academy place is!
Mae Cichelli Creative 
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