Expert Mode: When Promotion Becomes a Tax, with Travis LaBazzo from Amped Fitness
This article is based on a Q&A with Amped Fitness Co-Founder and CEO Travis LaBazzo and Greg Kihlström for The Agile Brand Guide’s Expert Mode series.
Every category has a default marketing playbook, and in low-price fitness the default is the offer. Say the number. Say it often. Beat the club down the street by five dollars a month. Planet Fitness built an empire that way, and the approach works right up until the moment everyone else is running it at the same price.
Amped Fitness ran that playbook for years. In January the company still described itself, in its own press materials, as a “high-value, low-price fitness concept.” By August those same releases were calling it “an immersive fitness brand.” That’s not a copy refresh. It’s a company changing what it leads with, in public, over roughly eight months. Travis LaBazzo, Co-Founder and CEO, says the shift was never about walking away from price — it was about refusing to let price be the most interesting thing about the business.
Price Was Never Going to Be the Reason Anyone Told a Friend
Amped now runs more than 40 clubs across Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, with Ohio announced this summer. The July flagship in Sugar Land, Texas opened with eight named rooms under one roof. LaBazzo’s account is that the language moved because the product moved first, and the old positioning stopped describing what members were actually walking into.
“Price never stopped mattering. We just realized it shouldn’t be the most interesting thing about us. ‘High-value, low-price’ tells you the economics. It doesn’t tell you why someone would be excited to walk through the door… What we gave up was some immediate simplicity. Price is easy to communicate. Experience takes more storytelling.”
That trade-off is the part worth sitting with. Price positioning is cheap to run and almost impossible to misunderstand — one number, high recall, works in a six-second pre-roll. Brand as experience costs more in creative, takes more channels, and takes longer to register. So when a CMO argues for the move, the real question isn’t whether experience is the better position. It’s whether the organization has the budget and the patience to fund a slower-building message while the competition keeps shouting a number. What LaBazzo is protecting is the sequence: he wants the price reaction to land after the experience, not before it. His preferred version of the customer response is “I can’t believe all of this is included at that price” — which only works if something else got their attention first.
A Room Nobody Builds Into Their Routine Isn’t Earning Its Square Footage
The Sugar Land club’s eight spaces include Lunar Escape, Sweat Cinema, Aura Pilates, Planet Peach and Babe Cave After Hours. Every one of them is floor area that isn’t holding squat racks. For a category where revenue per square foot is the whole game, that’s a live risk, so we asked how he knows a room is pulling its weight.
“The simplest signal is member pull. Are people actually using it, coming back to it and talking about it? We look at utilization, repeat engagement, member feedback and whether an experience is influencing acquisition or retention. A room can look incredible, but if members don’t build it into their routine, then it isn’t earning the space… We’re not emotionally attached to any concept.”
The willingness to tear something out is the part most marketing organizations can’t match. Experience investments have a way of getting built, celebrated at the opening, and then never evaluated again, because nobody wants to be the person who admits the installation was a mistake. LaBazzo saying the room gets rethought or replaced is a governance position, not a design one, and it’s the more useful half of his answer. Push on the measurement, though, and it’s softer than it sounds. Utilization and customer retention influence are directional signals, not return on experience in any testable sense. None of that tells you whether the room caused the retention or just happened to sit near it. A CMO borrowing this model should borrow the kill criteria and build the incrementality test Amped hasn’t described.
Disney Doesn’t Own Roller Coasters
There’s an obvious counter here, and LaBazzo has more reason than most to resist it. Amped franchises, and it took a strategic investment from Princeton Equity Group in January to fund national expansion. Every themed room in a new club is capital somebody has to put up. Recovery lounges, reformer Pilates and cinema cardio are also showing up at nearly every large operator right now, none of it proprietary. So the experience story is both his brand thesis and, conveniently, his franchise pitch. We put that to him plainly.
“If the strategy were simply ‘add more amenities,’ I’d agree with the skeptic. Pilates isn’t proprietary. Recovery isn’t proprietary. Neither is a movie screen. What matters is how those things are combined, designed and presented as a brand. Disney doesn’t own roller coasters. What makes Disney different is the world around the ride.”
The analogy earns its place, and it also lets him off a little easy — Disney’s moat is fifty years of intellectual property and a price point roughly forty times Amped’s. Still, the underlying claim holds: in a category where every component is purchasable, coherence is the only thing that isn’t. The test he offers is whether something materially improves the member experience or strengthens the brand, which sounds disciplined but passes almost anything in a planning meeting. The sharper line is the one he draws next, between behavior-changing experience and what he calls “expensive decoration.” That distinction is portable, and any marketing leader with a physical footprint should steal it. For a franchisor, though, the real arbiter isn’t the brand team. It’s whether the franchisee’s P&L agrees a year after the buildout.
Creators Make Belief. Paid Media Rents Attention.
Amped ran its first creator program this summer — Amped Summer, launched in June under CMO Danyal Ali with a $25,000 prize pool and a three-month window. The company reports more than 2,000 participating creators and over 100 million social views. The $10,000 grand prize went to Houston creator Joel “J.D.” Valdez, whose entry documented returning to training after being shot six times in 2021. Plenty of CMOs are being pitched a version of this right now, so the useful question was what it did that media buying couldn’t.
“Paid media can buy attention. Creators can create belief… The biggest failure mode is treating creators like another media channel. If you hand them a script and ask them to repeat your advertising, you’ve eliminated the reason you hired creators in the first place.”
The warning is worth more than the view count. A scripted creator program produces advertising wearing a creator’s face, at creator prices, and audiences read it instantly — which is the whole failure state of influencer marketing as a line item. LaBazzo says Amped judged the program on reach and content production but also on whether it built culture around the brand, and that second criterion is asserted rather than measured. The stronger evidence is Valdez. No brief would have produced that story, no agency could have written it, and it generated the kind of word of mouth a media plan can only hope to amplify after the fact. That’s the actual case for the program, and it’s better than the number.
His prescription for a CMO stuck in a discounting category is to change the question before changing the budget — stop asking how to make the offer louder and start asking what you could build that gives people something else to talk about. He’s blunt about where the current approach ends up. Promotion, in his framing, “eventually becomes a tax”: everyone discounts, everyone matches, and nobody comes out more differentiated than they went in.
Then he offers a test that’s almost insultingly simple. Does someone pull out their phone when they walk into it? It won’t survive contact with a finance committee, and it ignores half of what makes an experience work. But it’s a behavioral standard rather than a spend justification, which is more than most experience budgets ever get held to. Before the next one goes into your plan, decide what visible reaction would prove it worked — and what you’ll actually do in twelve months when it doesn’t.
