The specialist creative agency for wellness and the outdoors

Brands in this industry help people fulfil their goals in health, fitness and lifestyle. This stuff's personal, which presents a challenge for brands who want to reach people on that level. This is our area of expertise.

By improving your brand we'll help you improve the effectiveness of your marketing, which means you can either reduce your spend or increase your reach. By focussing on branding and how the brand is expressed, the business gets better at building trust, making connections with the right customers and holding on to them.

We have 25 years experience in strategy and design for branding, print, digital and content. Some of our clients work with us for the long term, others just need a campaign or brand identity and are set.

Every brand in this industry creates experiences, even the latest supplement or gizmo. Jo Customer is dreaming of her next achievement and is looking for the right brands to help her get there.

Tell us what you need, let's book in a meeting »

🏔️ At Studio Outside we believe the more people we attract to the outdoors the more chance we have of saving the planet. That's our mission.

What makes this industry so special and yet difficult to take to market?

"It's so amazing that I can't find the words to describe the feeling."
— a client somewhere

When your clients get peak experiences like that you've discovered some secret sauce. It's the stuff that inspires us and makes life fulfilling. It only happens when the client has complete trust. Bottling it and selling it is no easy task.

Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. Yet trust is the most important brand attribute in this industry. Afterall we work with customers' personal goals, hopes and dreams. They are not going to just trust these things to anyone.

Jo Customer has a problem to solve, is dreaming of her next achievement and is looking for the right brand to help her get there. How can you stand out from the pack, build trust and get the best outcomes from your marketing effort?

When making promises about these things brands usually fall back on dry messages like "joy" or "breathtaking", which isn't compelling because it isn't unique or helpful. Nor do they build trust. It's a missed opportunity! Inefficient marketing is a drain on budget and resources.

With the right brand strategy and design the right customers will tune in and you will earn their trust at every touchpoint.

We've created a 10 minute experiment that will help you explore your brand and improve how it can build trust.

Trust building experiment: Use these 6 easy tasks to improve your brand and build trust, and test it on a social campaign

No one trusts a person who says "Trust me", so how do we do it? Businesses build trust through their brand. A properly designed and implemented brand is easy to understand and relate to, which builds trust and increases interest, retention and loyalty. It's the warm face, voice and open body language that appeals to the right people and delivers your marketing message.

This will only take 10 minutes. Grab a pen and paper, you're going to write down some ideas that will change your brand and your business, then you will test your ideas on a social campaign.

1. It's all pointless without a deep understanding of the customer and what motivates them. Write a few sentences that describe a typical customer, their likes/dislikes, life goals, favourite food, even give them a name... write down anything that helps you describe them.
2. Your offering is unique and you need customers to understand it on a practical and emotional level. Make a list of practical features/benefits, then in a second column list the emotional rewards for every feature/benefit. In a third column write down how you can encourage trust-building around that feature/benefit.
3. Your business is more than just what it sells. Your brand is the part that people relate to, it's an image in their mind created by everything you put out there. Define your brand in human terms to make it easy to relate to. Task #3 is to imagine if the brand was a person, what makes them relatable and trustworthy? Is it serious and dependable, or easy going? Think about what makes your business unique, be very specific and write it down.
4. How do you like staff to talk to customers? How you do this says a lot about your brand, and should inform other decisions that you make about branding and marketing. This is your brand voice. How does it build trust? Tip: When you develop or change a brand strategy it is especially important to communicate this back to frontline workers.
5. It's time to craft a unique promise. When you communicate a promise always put the customer in the picture ("you") rather than your business ("I/we"). What's in it for them? Consider your ideas in tasks 1-4.
6. A prospective customer will give you two seconds to build anticipation, inspire action and loyalty... Go! Design a small social campaign: Choose an offer that you have run before in social media so you can compare results later. In tasks 1-5 you have outlined ideas that make your brand more relatable and trustworthy. Choose two or three of the ideas from the tasks above that you think will help build trust. With those in mind, carefully choose an image, write a headline and some text (no AI please).

Now implement your campaign today and measure the interest. A significant boost in your engagement compared to the original campaign means you've improved trust signals. We'd love to hear how it went.

This is an experiment with a sample size of one, but we hope you still got some benefit from it. Trust building occurs in every touchpoint of the customer relationship. So while today's experiment may feel like a drop in the ocean, further experimentation with different aspects of your business identity and campaigns will show results.