Interview of a Marketer

Michael Castoro

Professor Graham

Marketing

October 21, 2016

 While interviewing a marketer, I learned many different types of things that they do day

in and day out. I also learned that what we have discussed in class has been very helpful to me

talking with my marketer. The person I decided to interview was Kristina Radek of Life Fitness.

She holds the title of Director of Global Brand Strategy and Communication. I was able to

actually meet with Ms. Radek in person over fall free days as she works with my mom. She is

very good at what she does and has been with Life Fitness for eight years now. Her position is

responsible for managing products within a specific fitness product category and a product

channel. She said that the best part about her job is that she gets to directly communicate with

customers and feels that the personal connections she has are ones that mean more than just

doing business. Ms. Radeks responsibilities include new product development, category

management, product management through a products life cycle, meaning that if there are any

changes in what the customers want or what the competition is doing different, that they have to

adjust to that and make changes accordingly. This is a very important aspect in her line of work

because of the name that Life Fitness carries. Some quick background about the fitness company

is that Life Fitness is an American fitness equipment company that specializes in the production

and distribution of equipment such as stationary bikes and treadmills. They developed the

industry's first electronic stationary bicycle. The founders, Ray Wilson and Augie Neato, bought

a design in 1970 for the world's first electric stationary exercise bike from Dr. Keene P.

Dimmick, and marketed it as the LifeCycle. In 1991, Bally Total Fitness sold Life Fitness to a

group of investors for $62.5 million. Most recently, Life Fitness was acquired by Brunswick

Corporation in June 1998 and still own Fitness Company today.

There are plenty of other responsibilities that Ms. Radek has within the company. She

talked about her responsibilities the most throughout our conversation, which means she takes
her position at the company very seriously. Ms. Radeks responsibilities are to develop the

business case an financial justification for new products and feature enhancements and present

them to the executive management. She leads multi-function teams that execute projects from

the development phase through to the product launch and even beyond. These teams may

include representatives of engineering, sourcing, manufacturing, testing, service, sales,

marketing, quality and international. She was quick to say that this is one of her favorite things

to do because she is a team player. She told me that being a team player is one of the most

important things to have not only in the marketing industry, but in the business industry as a

whole as it shows your company you are willing to do whatever it takes to make the business

better by working with others. Ms. Radek however also said that she likes to be a leader as well

so she needs to find a happy medium in playing her role within the team and then finding a time

and a place to take a stand and speak out on what her team needs to do. Regardless, this is one of

her strengths of her personality. She does some financial management that includes measuring

and analyzing product profitability, growth and cash flow. She collaborates with external

vendors to endure that sources products are manufactured to specifications. Life Fitness really

listens to their consumer industry and the people buying their product. She develops category

knowledge through extensive market research, which I told her we have been talking about in

class, and she said that they use that research all of the time. Ms. Radek collaborates with

creative services departments to provide and approve product information for all product related

marketing materials. The final point that she touched on as a responsibility was to continuously

perform competitor surveillance product intelligence and communicate findings to the team

members and other relevant internal departments.

 Life Fitness is constantly looking at research and trying to find out what it is exactly that

consumers are wanting in their product. Their biggest competitor is Precor. This is a company

that I have never even heard of until after my interview with Ms. Radek.

Life Fitness is a company that does use the marketing concept. They take their customer

needs very seriously and will base their products off of that. Some important facts about the

fitness industry and the customers or users of the fitness equipment are very intriguing. One out

of every five Americans go to the gym. However, Ms. Radek puts it as One out of every five

Americans at least has a gym membership, they dont always go. Life Fitness recognizes this as

an opportunity for them to take advantage of a largely unhealthy and overweight population as a

whole. People are always looking for ways to exercise. According to the CDC, almost 70% of

Americans over the age of twenty are overweight, including 35% that are considered obese.

However, awareness and education about the importance of a healthy lifestyle continues to

increase. With a better understanding of this, we know that exercise improves energy levels,

decreases medical expenses and likely increases longevity. Life Fitness does have a market

orientation. As stated earlier by Ms. Radek, what the customer wants is a priority for the

company to tend to. While the fitness industry as a whole considers both fitness centers such as

a gym, and weight loss centers, Life Fitness is concerned with the fitness side. The businesses

that are providing an infrastructure or space, equipment, and training, in exchange for a

membership fee.

Life Fitness wants to target everyone essentially. The ones that want to become a

healthier person and have thoughts about becoming one, as well as the ones that are healthy

individuals who take their fitness seriously. Methods for who they target relies on their market

analysis and what companies are telling them from people who are using their equipment in the
gyms that they provide for. Ms. Radek told me an interesting fact that some of the small gyms

around the United States develop a cult following of a sort that keep these little gyms up and

running. It is kind of like the old style Rocky Balboa gyms that he would train in. The people

that have memberships at these gyms are hard to convert to a larger mainstream gym. This

presents a problem for the company since the littler gyms either cant afford some of the

machines that Life Fitness provides. While it may be easy to get their products to some of the

larger fitness gyms such as Planet Fitness, it is relatively difficult for them to get their product

into these smaller gyms that have been around for a longer period of time. This is one of the

problems that Life Fitness has within their company.

Ms. Radeks career advice for me was to get into something that I enjoy doing and to

always work hard. She enjoys being given a challenge and to overcome that challenge is

something special to her that she takes a great deal of pride in. She was quick to note that she

travels quite a bit and that it can be hard on her and her family, but that they all make it work and

she still wouldnt trade her position for another one. I always loved talking to people and being

involved in a personal setting and being a marketer or some type of salesperson would best suit

me in this industry I feel like.

One of the topics in the textbook that could be connected to the activities or opinions of

Ms. Radek would be the amount of stress that she put on the customers. This has a great deals

worth of importance to the marketing concept and even the marketing orientation. It does agree

with what the book has to say for a business to be successful. Life Fitness is very adamant on

adapting to the market and to the consumers need to stay atop their competition. I think that they

make great fitness equipment and I see it all over the place. Now, I may be a tad bit biased
because of some family ties to the company, but regardless, being able to learn about the

business in some ways I never would have otherwise from Ms. Radek was awesome.