• by Les Luchter , October 4, 2023

Therabody, entering the consumer wellness market today, is out to mainstream its flagship Theragun massage therapy device.

Expanding that product’s target audience beyond performance-centered athletes, both pro and amateur, Therabody is launching two wellness-targeted Theraguns backed by the company’s biggest marketing campaign ever.

The six-month campaign, Therabody’s chief marketing officer John Solomon tells Marketing Daily, “flips” the idea of workouts from deliberately undertaken physical activities to everyday life. “We’re all doing a workout,” he explains, “whether it’s a nurse on her feet or a mom trying to race up the stairs to get the kids out the door.”

Besides frontline workers like nurses and moms, Therabody’s  “The Workout Called Life” campaign also zeroes in on active seniors (55+). dads, corporate workers and delivery drivers. Each of those categories is the focus of one :15 vignette spot, which can be seen here.

Each spot shows people engaged in these everyday activities, while a graphic reads, “When your workout looks like this.” The scene then shifts to the same people using a Theragun as the screen reads, “Your recovery should look like this.”

“So much of our marketing previously was with the world’s best athletes,” so regular folks “weren’t seeing it [the Theragun] as a product for them,” Solomon explains.

To reach new audiences like older adults, Therabody, through its media agency PMG, is going heavy on TV -- from “Yellowstone” to cable news to HGTV. “We still really think TV is a great medium in a world of digital distraction,” Solomon says.

The media mix differs by category, though, with moms, for example getting more digital than TV.

In addition to the ad campaign, creative agency Forsman & Bendenfors worked with Therabody to revamp such areas as strategy, visual identity and packaging. While the brand’s packaging used to be very tech-focused, it’s now been changed to convey each device’s benefits, such as “sleep better, relieve pain, reduce stress,” Solomon says.

One of the new products, the Theragun Relief Comfortable, also lowers Theragun’s entry price by 25%, from $199 to $149.

That product will be sold in a navy color exclusively at Best Buy through Dec. 31, and in a sand color exclusively at Target through March 31. That exclusivity extends to online, since, as Solomon reveals, the two mass retailers bought out all Relief Comfortable inventory.

So not even Therabody itself will be selling the product until January. “It really helps them [Best Buy and Target] to have something exclusive that they could market, especially during the holiday period,” Solomon relates.

How widespread can Theragun become? Noting that “the vision of our founder [Dr. Jason Wersland] was, a Theragun in every household,” Solomon says the new audiences “are way bigger than the audiences we have right now. The opportunity is huge. We just need more people to have awareness of these products. We need to tell these stories beyond the athletes.”

To that end, Therabody did an awareness study prior to launch and will do a follow-up one after six months. “Our biggest metrics will be sales and awareness,” Solomon says.

Today’s product and marketing moves also restructure Therabody into three parts: performance, wellness and beauty. The beauty segment, which brings yet another audience to the company, launched in April with a Theraface Pro device, followed last month with an LED Theraface Mask.

The beauty audience, Solomon says, is a lot more digital, “so we’re leveraging TikTok, influencers, a lot more testimonials, working with dermatologists.” He notes that Best Buy “is starting to lean into this beauty tech category” and that Therabody is working with Sephora “on the right products to go into there.” And since “a lot of beauty tech is bought online, Amazon’s really big.”