The Cliffhanger Academy was a Manhattan personal training business struggling with an unclear brand and intense, price-based competition. Stuck exchanging time for money and facing a shifting market due to the pandemic, they had no clear path to growth. Our mission was to find a new way forward by completely reimagining their business model, creating a new brand that could escape the competition entirely and command a significant price premium.
The challenge was to rescue a personal training business from a commoditized, hyper-competitive market. The brand lacked a clear identity, struggling to articulate its value and suffering from inconsistent messaging. Trapped in a price war and an unscalable “time for money” model, the business was stuck. We needed to find a way to break them out of the crowded personal training category and create a new, more valuable, and defensible market position.
Our research revealed a massive, untapped market need: time-poor executives who were hiring both personal trainers and psychologists. Leveraging the founder’s background as a former psychologist, we created an entirely new category. We repositioned the business as a “psychology-first” offer that trains the mind through the body. The new brand, Psychology Fitness™, instantly owned this new space, allowing them to command a 300-400% price premium and create a unique barrier to entry that made their old competitors irrelevant.
CUT THRU created a new category for our health and fitness brand — it let us charge 3x the price and made the competition irrelevant.David Mykel, Founder, Psychology Fitness New York
We repositioned the business as a convenient, psychology-first offer that trains minds through bodies. This enabled us to create a new category, Psychology-Fitness™, with a name designed to take full ownership of the space. Rather than competing in two crowded markets, the new identity established the brand as the undisputed leader of a new, more valuable category with unique barriers to entry its competitors simply couldn’t replicate.