This article was based on the interview with Zoom Room CEO Mark Van Wye on agile dogs and agile brands by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
What if your most visible, most exciting product wasn’t your real product at all? It’s a question that can feel counterintuitive in a world obsessed with hero products and flagship services. We spend countless hours and dollars perfecting and promoting the one thing we believe defines our brand, the offering that shines brightest in our marketing materials. But what if that shiny object was merely the entry point—a Trojan horse designed to bring customers inside the gates for a much deeper, more meaningful, and ultimately more valuable relationship? This isn’t about deception; it’s about strategic sequencing. It’s about understanding the difference between the sizzle that attracts and the steak that nourishes and retains.
This is precisely the model that Mark Van Wye and his team at Zoom Room have perfected. On the surface, Zoom Room is an indoor dog training franchise, and its most eye-catching feature is canine agility—the fast-paced, visually dynamic sport you might catch on television. Yet, as Van Wye explains, agility is not the core product. It is the highly “Instagrammable” lure that draws people in. The real product is something far more profound: the bond between a person and their dog, fostered through shared learning, communication, and community. By architecting their entire business around this principle, Zoom Room has built a powerful flywheel for customer loyalty, turning a single service into a scalable engine for emotional engagement and sustainable growth.
1. The Sizzle and the Steak: Using the Hook to Sell the Relationship
For any brand, identifying the most marketable aspect of your offering is Marketing 101. The challenge, however, is ensuring that this hook doesn’t overshadow the deeper value proposition. Many brands fall into the trap of selling the feature, not the feeling; the transaction, not the transformation. Van Wye recognized early on that while the sport of dog agility was the initial draw, its true power lay in what it represented: a perfect state of communication between a human and their animal. This reframing allowed Zoom Room to position agility not as the end goal, but as the exciting vehicle for achieving a more fundamental desire.
“Agility is so Instagrammable for lack of a better word. I mean, it is it is the sizzle in marketing terms and and the relationship between the people and their dogs is is really the steak… People think that dogs run agility courses. They don’t. It’s the two together… running at full speed, the human has to be right there with the dog communicating in real time wordlessly to the dog, where to go, how to go… This is what everyone wants from their dog is real-time communication in both directions without breaking a sweat. If you could do that in the real world, you would have the most perfect interspecies communication system. That’s what agility is.”
For marketing leaders, the lesson here is a potent one. We must ask ourselves: what is our sizzle, and what is our steak? The sizzle is the feature that’s easy to capture in a 15-second video, the headline that grabs attention, the result that looks great in a case study. The steak is the underlying emotional outcome, the community, the sense of mastery, or the peace of mind that your service truly provides. Van Wye’s insight is that you don’t have to choose between them. Instead, you can use the sizzle as the explicit invitation to experience the steak, ensuring that the initial attraction evolves into a long-term, loyal relationship.
2. Engineering the Environment for Aspiration and Community
Once a customer is through the door, the experience must be meticulously designed to guide them from the initial hook to the core value. This isn’t left to chance at Zoom Room. The entire physical environment is engineered to create a sense of aspiration and belonging. Even a customer who signed up for a basic puppy obedience class is immediately immersed in the world of agility. This constant, ambient exposure plants a seed of what’s possible, turning a one-time need into a long-term hobby and passion.
“The centerpiece of the Zoom Room is the gym. And even if you’re there for a puppy class… you can’t not see all the agility stuff everywhere… you’re seeing little teacup Chihuahuas jumping over the things in the photos. You’re seeing big bulldogs, and you’re going, ‘Wait, any dog can do agility?’… And then we give you the chance to feel the pride of teaching your dog how to jump through a hoop… because our motto is we don’t train dogs, we train the people who love them.”
This is customer experience design at its most effective. The environment itself becomes a marketing channel, subtly upselling and cross-selling not through aggressive tactics, but by fostering curiosity and desire. Furthermore, the model explicitly focuses on training the people, which naturally cultivates a strong sense of community. Customers aren’t just dropping off their dog; they are actively participating, learning alongside other owners, and sharing in their successes and struggles. This creates a powerful network effect where the value of the service increases with each new member who joins. For enterprise leaders, this underscores the importance of thinking beyond the digital journey. The physical or environmental context in which a customer interacts with your brand can be a powerful tool for shaping perception, driving engagement, and building a moat of community that competitors can’t easily replicate.
3. Designing for Scale from “Day Negative One”
A great concept is one thing; a scalable business is another. Many businesses with a strong local following falter when they try to expand because their model is too dependent on a single charismatic founder or a specific set of local conditions. Van Wye’s approach was different. The franchise model wasn’t an afterthought; it was the entire plan from the beginning. This “design for scale” mentality forced a level of discipline and systemization that is often missing in early-stage companies. The goal was to create a “headless system” that could be replicated anywhere by anyone with the right passion, not necessarily a deep background in dog training.
“Day negative one. So it was designed from the beginning… It had to be a headless system that had a solid technology stack and something that could be put in place by someone with no prior skill. You couldn’t have a cost of labor that would drag this thing down. It had to be something where, as long as you’ve have people that are energetic and passionate about other people and animals, the business will will hunt.”
This is a masterclass in operational strategy. By focusing on creating replicable systems, a solid tech stack, and a low barrier to entry for franchisees, Zoom Room built a model where brand consistency and quality control are baked into the DNA, not bolted on later. For marketing leaders in large organizations, this resonates deeply. As we manage campaigns, technologies, and teams across different regions and business units, the challenge is always consistency and efficiency. The principle of designing for scale from the outset—whether it’s for a new product launch, a content strategy, or a technology rollout—is critical. It forces us to simplify, to document, and to build systems that empower local execution without diluting the core brand promise.
4. Asking “Better Questions” of Your Technology Stack
In the world of MarTech, it’s easy to become beholden to the platforms we use. We adapt our processes to fit their workflows and measure what they tell us to measure. Van Wye advocates for flipping this dynamic on its head. He argues that we have entered an era where technology should be bespoke, molded to the specific, nuanced needs of a business, rather than forcing a business into a one-size-fits-all SaaS framework. This shift happened not because of external market pressure, but because his team started asking better, more fundamental questions about what their franchisees, their customers, and their corporate team truly needed to succeed.
“We have entered a new era in which software itself can be something that serves the exact needs of your specific taco truck… once you move into that bespoke area, you can ask the questions of, what do our franchise need? What do our franchisees actually need? What do our customers need?… What actually moves the needle? How could you build something that answers the vital questions that we really care about every day? And once you ask those questions, now you can build that and you have a vastly better and more efficient system.”
This perspective is a powerful antidote to the “shiny new tool” syndrome that plagues many marketing departments. The goal isn’t to acquire more technology, but to deploy the right technology that simplifies operations and surfaces the most critical signals from the noise. For leaders evaluating their tech stack, the call to action is clear: stop asking “what can this software do?” and start asking “what are the most vital questions we need to answer to move our business forward?” By starting with the desired outcome and the essential KPIs—like franchisee profitability, lifetime value, and operational simplicity—you can architect a technology ecosystem that serves the business, not the other way around. This approach frees up human capital to focus on what matters most: being present and delivering exceptional value to customers.
The Zoom Room story offers a compelling blueprint for building a modern, agile brand. It begins with the strategic insight to use a high-visibility service as a Trojan horse, drawing customers in with an exciting promise to deliver a deeper, more emotionally resonant experience. This strategy is supported by a meticulously engineered customer environment that fosters aspiration and builds a powerful, self-sustaining community. The entire model is built on a foundation designed for scalability from its inception, ensuring brand consistency and operational efficiency are not afterthoughts but core components of the business.
Ultimately, this all comes together through a thoughtful and intentional approach to technology, where systems are built to answer the most vital business questions, simplifying complexity and empowering people to do what they do best. For those of us leading marketing efforts in complex organizations, the challenge is to look at our own offerings through this lens. What is our sizzle, and what is our steak? Are we merely selling a product, or are we facilitating an outcome? By answering these questions with clarity and conviction, we can begin to build not just campaigns, but flywheels of growth that are as sustainable as they are powerful.
