A new fall campaign for GoodLife Fitness is moving the focus from the hurdles that a person has to overcome to reach their fitness goals to how great it feels once you do, no matter how small those goals might be.

A video for the new “Best Yourself” campaign, handled by DS+P, is focused on the individual, featuring a tight close-up of each athlete’s face and not showing what kind of exercise they’re doing or how much weight they’re lifting. The idea, as is reinforced by the voiceover, is to be focused on yourself, your own fitness goals and using the feeling of achieving them to motivate you further.

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In addition to the anthem spot, there are shorter, 15-second cuts focusing on individual activities like running on the treadmill or jumping rope. The video content will run online and across social networks. Some of the social posts and banner ads in the campaign will promote GoodLife’s value-focused offers – for example, getting your first three visits free, or getting two personal training sessions for $75 – updated with new creative from the campaign.

Support on traditional channels like direct mail and radio feature creative similar to the videos and display ads, but also include a call to action to visit the campaign microsite to tie all the campaign assets together.

Last year, GoodLife’s “The Struggle is Real” fall campaign attempted to show that it understood the struggles people go through to regularly visit the gym and that it could help to overcome them.

While that message was ultimately a positive one, Sharon Litwin, marketing director at GoodLife Fitness, says the idea this year is to focus less on the difficulty of reaching fitness goals and more on how good it feels once you do.

“A lot of people have this huge list of fitness goals and it really seems overwhelming, which was part of ‘The Struggle Is Real,'” Litwin says. “But we want people to want to achieve their goals, so there has to be more energy to it and it has to be more inspirational for you to get the message. This still aligns with who we are, but for the individual it’s about not looking at who is beside you, it’s about looking forward and those small personal gains you get every day as a way to motivate you to stick with it until you get to the next one, and the next one after that.”

GoodLife is the category leader in fitness clubs but Litwin says it has to continue to prove its value to Canadians, as it fends off competition from new chains, small boutique clubs and the latest fitness fads.

“To do that, we need to set the bar and own the thing everyone desires no matter how they exercise, which is results,” Litwin says. “Instead of showing how hard it is to get those results as a way of saying ‘We get you,’ this year we felt that the tone could still be real, but wanted it to be more anthemic and motivating. We don’t come out and say it’s about getting results, but we do say success happens here, because it’s all about your personal achievement, even if that comes in little steps.”

GoodLife’s previous target was in its mid-30s, but Litwin says this campaign is skewing younger and targeting those in their late 20s and early 30s.

“We know this audience has experimented with a lot of different kinds of exercises in the past or might have joined a studio before and not stuck with it,” she says. “We recognize the communities that exist out there and want them to see GoodLife as a home they can feel good about visiting.”