Cornerstone Design and Marketing has forged an unrivalled reputation within the leisure and wellbeing industry, with many clients – including GM Active – joining the Oldham-based agency via word-of-mouth recommendations from other leisure industry operators.
Its full-service marketing offer covers design, digital, print/signage, marketing strategy, web design and maintenance, and PR – all of which have been utilised for the benefit of GM Active at one time or another.
Cornerstone DM is one of our longest serving Strategic Business Partners, and here MD and founder, David Wadsworth, speaks about his agency’s ethos and why it has put the full force of its marketing muscle behind GM Active.
I launched Cornerstone from a room at my parents’ home 17 years ago, and from day one, I’ve always strongly believed that good business is based on the three Rs – relationships, results and reputation. I’ve also been a stickler for honesty, integrity and authenticity, choosing clients carefully.
As an agency, we’ve worked closely with a diverse range of leisure clients for well over a decade and developed an intrinsic understanding of their unique markets, target audiences and stakeholders.
So, the simple answer to the question is we want to work with GM Active to help it deliver more.
Population health and wellbeing is a fundamental part of our first world society. But it’s also on a knife edge – concerns about childhood obesity and what that is storing up for the future; poor lifestyle choices among the adult population and the impact that is having on the here and now, particularly on the NHS.
If we don’t tackle these issues and encourage more people to live healthier, happier – and longer – lives then that is a fundamental failure.
GM Active recognises the issues and is working tirelessly to create solutions. We wouldn’t be choosing our clients carefully if we didn’t want to leverage the three Rs and be part of that movement.
Cornerstone’s services for GM Active are almost entirely B2B and include strategic marketing, PR, media handling and planning, as well as aiding the growth of its digital footprints, brand reach and recognition through social media activity.
Our work includes creating press releases and social media campaigns about services, topics and themes, which have led to diverse national and regional media coverage across print, digital and broadcast media, including leading B2B leisure and health magazines.
Our PR nous was invaluable in helping GM Active members stave off potential negative media coverage about pool closures.
Meanwhile, our social media activity has complemented the positive media coverage and helped to raise GM Active’s profile on LinkedIn and Twitter.
As a result of our input and support – and combined with the excellent work being done by GM Active and its collective of members – GM Active itself, its Pivot to Active Wellbeing, the Transformational Leadership Programme and the pioneering Prehab4Cancer programme are all seen as beacons of excellence by the health and wellbeing industry, as other strategic business partners have testified.
Quite a difficult question, but the answer is rooted in our ongoing work for GM Active and is already work in progress.
It’s part of our strategy to raise the organisation’s profile not only across the leisure insutry, but across the wider health, NHS, patient care and government stakeholders, in order to drive improved awareness of the social value and impact leisure can play in reducing health inequalities and driving a healthier society.
This will be achieved through a fully integrated marketing strategy, transformation of the GM Active website into a nationally recognised ‘site of reference’, and marketing outreach where expertise is shared and thought leadership is delivered to heighten GM Active’s growing profile.
Our work will continue to place case studies illustrating the excellent work being done by members of the GM Active collective in the right channels in order to bridge the gap between health and leisure, along with academic insight into what is needed to make that happen.
We’ll continue to work with GM Active to ensure that more of the same continues.
Continue to see the value in what we bring to GM Active and work with us to add even more in whichever way we can and spread the message of other operators across the GM region and further afield.
We are willing and waiting to build on what we have already achieved in unison as the next phase of the Pivot to Active Wellbeing comes to fruition, as the P4C programme expands, as more innovative training initiatives are introduced, and more case studies are ready to be highlighted.
GM Active needs to maintain momentum and in doing so we will continue to spread the word.
No one else is doing what GM Active does and it punches way above its weight given the size of the core organisation.
It combines two very important elements – innovation and action.
It has a clear vision of what the leisure industry needs to achieve to improve population health and wellbeing. While there has been a lot of talk about how the sector needs to ‘pivot’ (or even if pivot is the correct word), GM Active has stepped up and is actually doing something to make the pivot to active wellbeing a reality.
It champions the excellent work its members are doing, proving that the leisure industry is a worthy partner for healthcare professionals to help those living with long term health conditions, or going through rehab and recovery, to be the best they can be, regardless of the journey they are on.
If you want to know more about Cornerstone, you can find their website here.
