You Can Learn A Lot From 1st Phorm
1st Phorm isn’t like other supplement brands and that’s by design. Since 1st Phorm doesn’t fit neatly into a box, it seems to cause a level of ignorance by supplement industry pundits and media companies that has always seemed downright disrespectful to me. What does Sal Frisella (President of 1st Phorm) think?
Capitalism at its best
Around 31:43 of the YouTube video, you heard Sal Frisella mention something about being able to hold their own against competitors in any traditional capitalistic metric. Generating profitable revenue matters, and 1st Phorm is one of the best in the sports nutrition industry at achieving that. I’m stating this because it’s the beginning point “must have” if any company wants to also be wildly successful by a more important non-traditional capitalistic metric...
“Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
At its best, capitalism is beautiful and can be the biggest positive change agent for humanity. 1st Phorm does A LOT of really impactful things, but everything great starts with the company’s ability to generate profitable revenue. Any company can say they have a mission, but only authentically mission-driven companies can show actual proof. The most powerful proof will come from its customers and employees.
Celebrating Change
1st Phorm has changed countless customer lives...that's super evident even with the quickest glance at social media. The primary mechanism they do this is through offering free challenges. Don’t get it twisted though, because there’s nothing “free” about these TransPhormation challenges in respects to 1st Phorm. The cadence of emails, content creation, app functionality, spikes in customer service requests, the list goes on and on…these cost them A LOT of money and resources.
So, why does the company continue to offer them? 1st Phorm creates movement through challenges and that’s invaluable. Just getting your brand/product/message in front of your target market is not enough anymore, especially inside the noisy sports nutrition space. The free challenges at 1st Phorm gives their target audience a chance to be a part of something bigger than their everyday lives. It creates community through setting and achieving goals.
1st Phorm also does an exceptional job at making the process of sharing that transformation progress on social media extremely easy.
That does two important things:
it turns customers into brand advocates
it generates a massive amount of user generated content (UGC)
That UGC is utilized all over 1st Phorm social media. There’s very little promotion on 1st Phorm social media…because 1st Phorm knows that the real power of social media is through utilizing it as a storytelling tool…not a direct selling tool. That celebration of and constant interacting with customers also plays bigtime into building community because receiving recognition makes people feel like they are a part of something.
People Not Machines
“It is up to you to take steps against the grain, against all odds, against all negative influences, against all the nonbelievers and move forward daily with all of your heart.”
This excerpt was taken from the 1st Phorm “About Us” section, and likely written to motivate customers…but I think it was introspective of it’s decision to go against the sports nutrition industry grain. 1st Phorm doesn’t deploy the typical outsource everything possible asset-light business model that’s en vogue within the sports nutrition industry.
Being vertically-integrated isn’t easy, but how effective 1st Phorm has leveraged this business model goes underappreciated too often. 1st Phorm is a people company and believes you shouldn’t pay for what you can roll up your sleeves and do yourself. That goes for areas like media, answering your own customer service phone calls, and packing/shipping out all orders.
Something similar, that’s key to 1st Phorm being different, is how they think about influencers. While other sports nutrition companies go “whale hunting” for mega-influencers, 1st Phorm invests the time and resources into micro-influencers. That can be seen best through their ambassador program. The Legionnaire Program is best in class, not only in the sports nutrition space, but across any consumer product industry. 1st Phorm doesn’t require you to have X-number of followers to join. 1st Phorm knows that people trust their actual friends more than anyone else. So, even with 200 followers, if they actually know all of them and those 200 have trust built with that person…it's a win for 1st Phorm.
Beyond that, they don’t leave these Legionnaires out to figure it out themselves. They help these people build their brand and tell their stories to created lifelong marketers. This strategy also extends into the corporate employees and owners of the company. They all thoroughly understand that providing value, creating a movement, and building a connection to the audience is more important than what competitors think marketing is. Speaking of employees, as Sal Frisella mentioned in the above YouTube video, 1st Phorm was able to create 100s of new jobs during one of the toughest periods in business history. If that’s not directly changing people’s lives…I don’t know what is!
Final Thoughts
That leads me to my last point that gets overlooked too often by today’s shiny object syndrome world, and that’s how 1st Phorm exercises what Andy Frisella calls “aggressive patience.” The powerful 1st Phorm brand that you see today took a decade-plus of allowing the consistent investments into that brand time to grow. 1st Phorm is an incremental success story…one that takes just as much patience to fully understand and appreciate.