Fitness Explorer

Fitness & Training category creation. 2016
Global Category Marketing, ASICS

The Setup

Athleisure was pulling people into fitness who had no sport to prepare for. They were training for the sake of training. Feeling good, looking good, being strong. Not peaking for a season. ASICS was built for the opposite person. The whole identity was sport-specific, the technology was sport-specific, and the brand had spent decades earning credibility one sport at a time. And globally, no matter what each market thought its sports were, everyone knew ASICS as a running shoe company. That was the gap. A category was forming around people who trained without a sport, and ASICS had no definition of it, no framework for it, and no shared language for who those people were. Every country had its own view of what counted. Nobody had a global answer. I was asked to build one. Not launch a collection. Define the category, who it was for, and what ASICS was going to make for them.

The Challenge

Defining a new category inside a company with a strong existing identity means telling several powerful functions that the consumer has moved and the brand hasn't. In a global matrix where every market has its own read on its own market, that isn't a slide. It's a negotiation.

Three decisions carried it.

Define before designing. I started with the boring question nobody wanted to answer, which was what training actually is and how it differs from fitness. Six movement types, built with the Institute of Sport Science. It reads academic. What it did was make every downstream product argument settle on evidence instead of taste.

Segment on motivation, not demographics. Flex, Condition, and Power each got defined by why someone trains rather than how old they are or what they look like. That's what let footwear and apparel build to the same person without needing a single meeting about it.

Get it signed before anyone builds. I took the framework through Marketing, Footwear, Apparel, Marketing Intelligence, and Sport Science, up to global brand marketing, before it went anywhere. In a global matrix, an unsigned framework is a deck. A signed one is the brief everyone works from for the next three years.

What I Owned

  • Everything from category definition forward.

  • The framework itself, built with ASICS Institute of Sport Science and global consumer research across four markets.

  • Segmentation, positioning, and the naming that went to market.

  • Three-collection architecture spanning footwear and apparel.

  • Cross-functional alignment and sign-off across Marketing, Footwear, Apparel, Marketing Intelligence, and Sport Science.

  • Handover into product, regional marketing, and the campaign platform that carried it.

How it Landed

Product shipped against the segments within eight months. FIT YUI launched as FLEX and CONVICTION X as POWER, carrying the framework's own segment names into trade press and retail across Asia, Europe, and India. Consumer press releases described FIT YUI in the framework's language, as a shoe designed for flex training. Conviction X put ASICS into the CrossFit competitive set for the first time, reviewed head to head against the category leaders.

The campaign platform followed, launching under What Matters is You and running from 2017 onward. The SMSB community program built city collectives around creativity, movement, community, and mindfulness, populated by photographers, musicians, and parkour athletes rather than sport competitors. Later collections including JYUNI and the Liberty collaboration were built inside the same structure.

The category is still a named pillar in ASICS' corporate strategy, and the product direction it calls for, functionality and versatility, is the one this segmentation identified.

  • KENLU, January 2017: FIT YUI and CONVICTION X launch as the FLEX and POWER series

  • Media Infoline, February 2017: FIT YUI India launch and the What Matters is You platform

  • Hypebeast, November 2017: SMSB Singapore

  • OutdoorGearLab: Conviction X reviewed against the CrossFit competitive set

ASICS and the ASICS logo are owned and registered trademarks of ASICS Corporation.
All product and lifestyle photography appears courtesy of the respective photographers and the ASICS Corporation.