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Branding your Pilates studio

This is an excerpt from The Pilates Teacher's Toolkit by Jennifer Morley.

Branding is the process of creating a unique identity that distinguishes your business from competitors and connects with your target audience. It blends visual elements with messaging that reflects your studio’s purpose and personality. Strong branding builds recognition, trust, and loyalty, driving long-term success.1 Your brand should clearly express the mission, vision, and values you developed in chapter 2, helping you stand out in a competitive market.

With this intention, let’s focus on developing a color palette, designing a distinctive logo, creating promotional materials, crafting a compelling bio and résumé, and writing class descriptions that align with your brand values. Each of these steps will contribute to your unified, professional brand image.

Both branding and marketing are inherently public facing, making it essential to involve key stakeholders in the process. Stakeholder insight can help you shape materials that more effectively communicate your core message and resonate with your audience. We want our branding choices to emerge from a place of intention and authenticity. Let the meditation and journal questions below support you in connecting to the core of your brand and what it means to you.

Take a deep breath in, filling your lungs completely. As you slowly exhale, release any tension you’re holding in your body. Let your mind settle. Take a moment to consider that your brand is an expression of your purpose, your values, your energy, and your point of view. With your next breath, allow yourself to recall a moment that connects you back to your “why.” It might be a time you felt deeply aligned with your teaching. A class where something clicked. A story shared by a client. A moment when your own body surprised you with strength, grace, or healing. See if you can bring the memory to life in your mind. What colors are present in that memory? What textures, light, and emotions surround it?

Now, let that image fade and invite in a metaphor—a symbolic visual that captures the essence of what you offer. Perhaps it’s a rooted tree, a flowing river, a spiral, or a sunrise. Maybe it’s a piece of art, a shape, or something abstract. What colors and textures arise in this image? What does it represent about your teaching or your space?

Finally, visualize your studio. If you have a physical space, picture yourself standing at the entrance. If your practice takes place in various locations, create a vision of a room, real or imagined, that best represents your practice. See the energy, the atmosphere, the way people move through it. What do you want someone to feel when they arrive? What kind of experience do you hope to create? What colors and textures live in that environment?

Let the images and sensations from all three visions—memory, metaphor, and studio—gather in your awareness. Notice what stands out. What resonates? What feels most alive or most true?

When you’re ready, gently bring your attention back to the room. Open your eyes and take some time to journal about what emerged in your meditation. Note the images, colors, pictures, feelings, and ideas that materialized as representatives of your brand.

ESTABLISH YOUR BRAND

Take a moment to consider your mission statement, your vision statement, and your core values from chapter 2. Continue to identify and clarify the images and ideas that best reflect your brand by answering the following questions.

• As you look over your core values, are there one or two specific values that you would like to center in your branding and marketing? (Example: In the values section of chapter 2, one of my core values was athleticism for all. We use a wide range of ages and body types in our advertising, and almost all the images show exertion and strength. This connects to the high-energy feeling that came to me in the meditation.)
• Branding themes are the overarching ideas, messages, or concepts that define and communicate your brand’s identity to your audience. As you review your mission and your vision, what are the themes you want your marketing and branding to communicate? What are the feelings you want your brand to evoke? (Example: My mission centers on caring about each person who walks in the room. I would like my branding to express empathy and care. I kept returning to the image of a cup of hot tea at my favorite restaurant. Drinking hot tea with my friends connects to the kind of empathy and care I want to offer clients in my studio.)

More Excerpts From The Pilates Teacher's Toolkit

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