Walk into a CrossFit gym on any given morning and you’ll see something that looks less like a workout and more like a way of life. People push each other through grueling routines, celebrate strangers hitting personal records, and reorganize their evenings, diets, and social circles around a shared training philosophy. Multiply that scene by 14,000 gyms across the globe, and you have one of the most striking examples of a brand that pulls consumers into a full-blown identity.
How does that happen? For decades, marketing scholars have offered three main answers: brands build tight-knit communities, brands cultivate quasi-personal relationships with consumers, or brands craft resonant myths that resolve cultural anxieties. A new article in the Journal of Marketing argues that all three explanations have been missing something more fundamental going on beneath the surface.
A different lens on brand devotion
Craig J. Thompson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Anil Isisag of emlyon business school propose a concept they call “brand performativity.” In plain terms, some brands don’t just sell products or symbols. They supply consumers with a full script: a vocabulary, a set of practices, physical equipment, measurable goals, standards of what counts as doing it right, and a philosophy about what it all means. Consumers use that script to build a new version of themselves.
The authors borrow the idea of performativity from sociology, where scholars have used it to describe how economic models, for instance, don’t just describe markets but actively shape how markets behave. Applied to brands, the concept suggests that certain brands create the conditions under which their promised identity payoff becomes real. You cannot be a CrossFitter, a Trekkie, or a Harley rider without those brands’ particular arrangements of ideas, objects, and rituals.
Thompson and Isisag distinguish between brands that use this approach in a light way (celebrity endorsements, aspirational imagery, lifestyle associations) and those that go deep. The deep versions supply life philosophies, training methods, normative guidelines, community rituals, and metrics for measuring self-improvement. Think Bikram yoga, Weight Watchers, Marie Kondo’s KonMari method, or Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.
Inside CrossFit’s box
To develop and test their framework, the researchers spent two years studying CrossFit. Isisag embedded himself as a participant observer at a mid-sized gym (which CrossFitters call a “box”) in the Midwestern United States, going from timid novice to committed member. He also spent time at two smaller boxes and interviewed 24 people in depth, including four box owners and coaches and 20 members. The team also collected articles, videos, and posts from CrossFit’s website and social media, and archival news coverage stretching from the brand’s founding to its recent turmoil.
What emerged was a picture of CrossFit as an unusually complete performative system. Its founder, Greg Glassman, built the brand around two guiding ideas. The first was “General Physical Preparedness,” a whole-body definition of fitness that spans strength, flexibility, endurance, agility, coordination, and other capacities. The second was “collaborative competition,” the notion that fitness should be pursued in groups where people push each other while celebrating everyone’s progress.
These ideas are given material form by the spartan warehouse gyms, the workout of the day (the WOD in CrossFit jargon), the low-tech barbells and pull-up rigs, the coaching certifications, and the scaling system that lets a beginner and a competitive athlete do the same workout at different intensities. The whole arrangement, the researchers argue, functions as a script that members use to remake themselves.
Why consumers buy in: the role of “authenticating assurances”
A brand asking consumers to invest their identity has to first convince them that the promised transformation is real. The authors call the mechanisms brands use for this job “authenticating assurances.” Some are conventional: expert endorsements, scientific studies, before-and-after testimonials.
But CrossFit added another layer, drawing on what philosophers call parrhesia, a term for frank speech that puts the speaker at risk. Glassman spent years attacking conventional gyms, established fitness organizations like the American College of Sports Medicine, pharmaceutical companies, and even government health agencies. When early news reports linked CrossFit to cases of rhabdomyolysis, a dangerous condition from overexertion, Glassman did not deflect. He said flatly that it could kill you and that he had always been honest about the risk. That willingness to court controversy, the researchers argue, signaled sincerity and helped position CrossFit as a truth-teller in a field of allegedly compromised institutions.
Later, when Glassman repositioned CrossFit as a cure for chronic disease, he expanded these confrontations to include the medical establishment, accusing federal health agencies of being captured by pharmaceutical and soda industry interests. Whether or not the claims held up to scrutiny, they fit within what the authors describe as a “zone of normative legitimacy,” a cultural space where skepticism of institutional authority is broadly accepted.
The capabilities members cultivate
Members interviewed for the study described three kinds of transformations they experienced through CrossFit. The first was a capability for reinvention. Angie, a 27-year-old bartender and student, described using CrossFit as a structure that helped her manage what she called an addictive personality and refocus on finishing her degree. Michelle, a 44-year-old business development manager, lost more than 100 pounds and eventually became a coach.
The second was a capability for preparedness. CrossFit’s promise to prepare its members “not only for the unknown but for the unknowable” resonated with consumers seeking self-reliance in the face of an uncertain future, whether that meant terrorism-era anxieties in the 2000s or fears of chronic illness and physical decline later on.
The third was a capability for what the researchers, borrowing from philosopher Paul Ricoeur, describe as ethical living. Coaches in particular described a felt obligation to share CrossFit’s benefits with others, especially people who might not think fitness was for them.
When the script breaks
The framework also helps explain how brands built on performativity can crumble. In June 2020, in the middle of the pandemic and days after the killing of George Floyd, Glassman tweeted a dismissive comment linking Floyd’s death to his skepticism about COVID-19 statistics. A leaked Zoom call soon followed in which he told gym owners he was not mourning for Floyd. The reaction was swift: affiliates threatened to leave, sponsors including Reebok cut ties, and within days Glassman announced his retirement.
The researchers argue that Glassman’s earlier acts of provocation had worked because they fell within a space of legitimate anti-establishment critique that many consumers found credible. His comments about Floyd, by contrast, fell outside that zone and clashed directly with CrossFit’s stated commitment to inclusiveness across ages and fitness levels. The parrhesiastes became, as the authors put it, a pariah.
What this means for brand managers
Thompson and Isisag argue that their framework revises some conventional wisdom. The brands-as-relationship-partners view, they suggest, misreads figurative language. When Angie says CrossFit “saved” her a little, she is not treating the brand as a literal savior. She is describing a process of using its structure to reorganize her life.
Similarly, the brand community literature has often assumed consumers flock to brands because they crave social connection. The authors argue that in cases like CrossFit, community is a means rather than an end. The shared workouts serve as ongoing collective validation that the brand’s promised transformation is real.
The cultural branding view, which emphasizes brands offering mythic escape from cultural contradictions, describes what the authors see as a lighter form of performativity. More extensive performative brands don’t just offer imaginative relief; they give consumers actual tools to remake their daily lives.
The framework also cuts across the traditional distinction between product and service brands. CrossFit is nominally a service, but its identity value depends on gyms, equipment, licensed products, and brand partnerships. Goop is nominally a product company, but its identity value flows through newsletters, podcasts, wellness summits, and a Netflix series. In both cases, the payoff for consumers comes from the synergy across all these pieces, not from any single one.
For managers considering this approach, the authors suggest three levers: building coherent connections between a brand’s ideas and its material offerings, layering multiple types of assurances that the brand’s promises are trustworthy, and creating spaces where consumers can witness one another’s transformations. The bigger the promise a brand makes about reshaping identity, the more extensive the supporting arrangement needs to be for consumers to find the offer credible.
