Aart Jan Van Triest – Fitchannel

Aart Jan Van Triest is CEO at Fitchannel, an online subscription service allowing you to exercise at home and eat healthy with the help of nutrition plans and recipes. Before joining Fitchannel, Aart Jan worked for companies like Unilever and FrieslandCampina and worked overseas in Singapore, China and Switzerland. Aart Jan: “I have always worked in the food industry and am a huge sportsman myself. I never understood why those two worlds don’t come together. Improving your lifestyle is about getting enough exercise and eating healthy, but those industries don’t interact with each other except for sports nutrition. Then 3 years ago I came across Fitchannel. Their goal was to develop a lifestyle platform to get and keep people moving and help them make healthy food choices. After 10 minutes in the chair they asked me to be CEO.”

realising growth

Aart Jan doesn’t believe marketers can create trends, but he does believe marketers can create growth by recognising upcoming trends early enough: “I always compare it to surfing. If you jump on a small wave that swells, there is energy there and you can ride it. If you jump on that wave when it is at its highest point, the energy has left and it can only go down. Especially in big companies, the ideas start when that first wave is already at a certain peak. They try to jump on it but often fail. Others have ridden the wave for years, and it becomes too crowded. A good marketer looks around to see what waves are coming. I don’t think marketers create trends, trends are largely determined by demographics. By understanding how that wave fits into people’s lives, you can develop the right products and services.”

“A few years ago, I took part in an innovation workshop”, Aart Jan continues. “Something that stuck by me was that if you want to know how people live ten years from now, you have to go to the dark side of society. There are already people living that life, however awkward and clumsy it is. If you want to know which waves are coming as a marketer, you need to make yourself comfortable with them and do the research. Growth is a natural phenomenon and we try to make growth linear, but that is not how it works. Sometimes you just already need to be in a market before it grows exponentially. We have grown quite a bit these past few years, but not yet exponentially. I am convinced that will happen, but it might take another five years.”

“The essence of marketing is to be very interested in the lives of very ordinary people.”

successful marketing

According to Aart Jan, the art of successful marketing is to look a the world through the eyes of others: “Where many marketers have an opportunity is to stop thinking that their world is the same as the world of their target and user audience. At the end of the day, autobiographical marketing is often dangerous. As a marketer, you have to be able to step out of yourself. Successful marketing products can be integrated into people’s lives. In the past, I did a lot of research on cooking aids in Asia. Women in the Philippines use cooking aids for very different jobs. They use meals to seduce their husbands, to solve arguments with their neighbours, to spoil their children. The most successful cooking aids are good at all these different jobs, allowing different people to use the same product for different reasons.”

“People are much more creative than we as marketers can imagine”, Aart Jan shares. “You give people a product and they do things with it that you never thought of before. The more you are open to this, the more chance you have of finding something that makes a product run much better. The essence of marketing is being very interested in the lives of very ordinary people. There is so much going on in people’s lives that they don’t want to deal with. If you understand that and therefore the relativity of your own product in people’s lives, however small, you can still have a great impact. To understand that cooking aids are the secret weapon of women in the Philippines is huge. Despite the man coming first, the woman determines what happens, and that is very important for her and her family. The better you understand that, the better your communication, product development, and price. By understanding people’s lives you can organise your marketing mix much better and ultimately be successful.”

driving Fitchannel ’s growth

Aart Jan says how we view health and health care will change: “We will be forced to take responsibility for our health. In countries like South Africa and America, you get a discount on your health insurance if you get your heart rate up three times a week compared to your weekly average, as that means you have been doing sports. That is where we will be heading in the future. The corona crisis also impacted the way people think about prevention and staying healthy. Take Fitchannel, our organic search has doubled in 2020 compared to 2019, and the same goes for this year. That is one side of the coin, the other side – and why Fitchannel-like propositions will continue to grow – is down to digitalisation. Few people can afford personal training, but by digitalising a lot of coaching, you can make it more affordable and, therefore, accessible for everyone.”

creating impact for the long term

Aart Jan thinks today’s marketing has lost itself in tactics and short term thinking: “It comes down to leadership. If the board wants quick wins, you will get marketers that get quick wins.” According to him, Fitchannel always tries to put the user first: “We used to ask people 20 questions before their first workout. However, many people don’t know their hip- or waist size by heart. They would answer the question later but never end up doing it. 30% of people paid for the subscription but never got to that first workout. So, we removed the questions and changed the onboarding to five clicks. 30% reduced to 9%, and the time to the first workout reduced from 2,5 days to less than 9 hours. We managed to make a significant contribution to the customer lifetime value. The sooner people start moving, the sooner they experience that wow-moment of a product, and the greater the chance they will continue using it. To do that, you need to have a clear picture of the end-user. It might not yield much in the short term, but after a while, it starts to make an impact.”

personal connection

“We have become better at mapping out the customer journey before people decide to start exercising”, Aart Jan continues. “These are familiar moments, think of panting at the top of the stairs and realising you need to do something about your stamina. These are trigger moments where people look for alternatives. Category entry points are very important to us. Search is also an important component. We have a very large share of search on certain keywords related to our products. We can find and convert people at the bottom of the funnel quite effectively. At the same time, we make sure that people stay with us for as long as possible. We have developed a 20-week coaching flow that digitally coaches people to exercise more and eat healthier. We also connect the workout schedule to people’s smartphone calendars. 30 minutes before you receive a text: ’You wanted to work out, have you rolled out your mat yet?’ By making this connection we are truly embedded in people’s personal lives. It is about making those connections and being relevant in a way that makes consumers want to bring your product or service into their lives.”