By Chris Reidy, The Boston Globe Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Feb. 24--CANTON, Mass.--Step aerobics sold a lot of shoes for Reebok International Ltd., and the company is hoping that a new exercise product called the Core Board will do the same.
'We think there's an opportunity to define a look around this program,' said chief marketing officer Angel R. Martinez.
Translation: Expect to see Core Board-inspired shoe and apparel lines late in the year.
While Core Board won't generate anywhere near the revenue of important shoe lines, it offers intriguing insights into Reebok's plans to use the online medium and 'viral marketing' as a more cost-effective way for promoting its products than signing up large numbers of sports stars with expensive endorsement contracts.
Just what is a Core Board? It's an unstable oval platform. Imagine indoor snowboarding movements performed while standing in one place, and that's part of the idea.
Training with a Core Board improves balance, Reebok says, and it strengthens muscles in the body's midsection that are underworked in many exercise routines.
With a suggested price of $190, the Core Board recently debuted in health clubs as part of group exercise classes. It can be purchased at a Reebok Web site, www.reebokcoregear.com, and it should reach stores later this year.
As Martinez sees it, the Core Board offers opportunities beyond selling new shoe and apparel lines. At a time when the company is rebounding from several subpar years, Core Board is part of larger strategy to help reposition the Reebok brand.
'Our goal is to be known as a fitness company,' Martinez said. 'Our goal is for consumers to think of us as their resource for fitness.'
The Core Board isn't the only thing Reebok is counting on to accelerate momentum. It recently signed tennis star Venus Williams to a big endorsement deal. It launched its new 'Defy convention' ad campaign. It also obtained the apparel licensing rights for the National Football League.
The company's financial performance reflects Reebok's improving fortunes. The stock has tripled since bottoming out below $10 a share a year ago, and net income in 2000 was the highest in three years. On the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, shares dropped $1.36 to close at $26.18.
As for the Core Board, outside observers are taking a wait-and-see attitude. A similar product called the wobble board has been around for a while, and its sales have been too small to turn up in surveys of the $3.3 billion market for exercise equipment, according to the National Sporting Goods Association.
Undaunted, Reebok is out to promote the Core Board with missionary zeal. At core.reebok.com, people can get an online tutorial on Core Board training and learn why its tilting, torqueing, and twisting movements are beneficial.
Parts of Reebok's Web sites are aimed at health club owners and professional trainers. Get those folks excited about Core Board, the reasoning goes, and the buzz should spread to the consumers who take group fitness classes at these clubs.
At Reebok's Web site, meanwhile, soccer star Julie Foudy and Chris Slade of the New England Patriots promote the Core Board in Web versions of TV commercials. The theme? 'Enter the power zone.'
Reebok wants consumers to view its Web site, particularly pages designated as part of 'Reebok University,' as a huge repository of information about fitness.
If Reebok can gain the trust of its customers by providing tutorials about such products as the Core Board, perhaps these customers will be willing to share information about themselves; that, in turn, could help Reebok both in designing new products and in marketing them more efficiently.
With the Core Board, Reebok is hoping history repeats itself. The first company to recognize aerobics as more than a fad, Reebok rode the women's fitness movement for much of the 1980s.
'There was a parade, and we jumped out in front of it,' Martinez said of the aerobics phenomenon.
Ever since, Reebok has been trying to orchestrate new fitness phenomena. One success came in the mid-1980s, when a trainer named Gin Miller devised Step Reebok, a series of aerobic exercise and dance movements originally based on stepping up and down on a milk crate.
Reebok refined Miller's idea and sustained it with a series of videos, each adding a new wrinkle to the basic routine. To promote it, the company tapped into a network of club trainers it often provides with discounted sneakers and apparel, and Step Reebok soon became a popular group class at many health clubs.
An investor who decided against backing Miller later told her, 'I missed out on a $750 million business.'
Reebok sees a similar opportunity with Core Board. Plans call for $25 videos with Core Board exercises designed to help golfers. Another Core Board video might be aimed at yoga practioners.
According to inventor Alex McKechnie, the Core Board is partly the outgrowth of physical therapy sessions with Paul Kariya, a hockey star with the Anaheim Mighty Ducks and, previously, with the University of Maine.
By 1996, Kariya's regular exercise routines were causing repetitive stress injuries, weakening muscles around the pelvis to the point where he could barely play.
Using a prototype of the Core Board, McKechnie devised exercises that worked the body's central muscles in an unpredictable sequence that avoided repetitive stress.
Two years later, McKechnie helped basketball star Shaquille O'Neal recover from a muscle tear in his stomach. By the time O'Neal had healed, McKechnie was convinced that his Core Board could be a fitness breakthrough.
'I could have gone the infomercial route,' said McKechnie, who instead partnered with Reebok because 'they could give it research, credibility, and marketing support that I couldn't.'
Once Reebok was convinced that a program for rehabbing pro athletes could be modified into a safe, fun, and easy-to-understand fitness routine for the average person, it decided to put its Web marketing muscle behind Core Board.
That's quite a change from a few years ago. In the early 1990s, sneaker makers signed hundreds of athletes to endorsement contracts in the belief that jocks could move their product.
But when sales later slumped, many companies, including Reebok, cut back on athlete endorsements and looked for more cost-effective ways to get out their marketing messages.
With Core Board, much of the offline marketing focus will be on fitness trainers at health clubs.
At WellBridge Health and Fitness Center, a 50-club chain with four clubs locally, the Core Board meshes neatly with the chain's marketing goals, said East Coast manager Bill Patjane.
More and more, clubs rely on revenues from consumers hiring personal trainers or signing up for group exercise classes.
As with fashion or toys, newness counts for a lot in fitness, and Core Board training is something new that fitness instructors can use to induce members to sign up for more group and one-on-one exercise sessions and boost club revenues.
As its Web sites strive to educate consumers about the Core Board, Reebok hopes to convey a larger message.
Said Martinez, 'It is integral to Reebok that we be defined for people as the world of fitness.'
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(c) 2001, The Boston Globe. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
RBK,
