Business View Magazine - April 2016 77
Over the first several years, Max Muscle opened ten
different company-owned locations focusing on pro-
viding sports supplements for athletes and body
builders. But, according to Greene, the company has
evolved over the past 25 years, along with the public’s
acceptance of the efficacy of amino acid products. “As
we’ve gotten older, we’ve seen the market broaden,
and protein becoming more understood by the main-
stream consumer. You see it now in big-box retail; you
see it much more frequently than it was before. 25
years ago, no one knew the importance of protein.
Now, you see it on the shelves in grocery stores and
drug stores.”
That shift in the marketplace is what prompted a re-
cent rebranding of Max Muscle’s corporate identity;
a process that Greene says the company began this
past year. “We wanted to broaden our market. It’s not
that we decided to move away from the more serious
athlete,” he demurs, “we certainly do have serious
athletes who still continue to come to our stores. But
what we’ve seen over the years is, because of the in-
ternet, where the consumer can potentially get their
products cheaper, those more serious athletes and
body builders that already know what they’re doing
choose that as a better option. That created the cus-
tomer paradigm shift in our stores because the cus-
tomer that we’re now seeing is the entry-level person,
the person that doesn’t know what they’re doing, the
person that’s frustrated because they can’t get results
– they’re the ones coming in. So we’ve gone from ‘Max
Muscle Sports Nutrition’ – which is much more of a
niche market and specialized for the serious athlete
or body builder - to ‘MM Nutrition by Max Muscle.’
The emphasis is much more now on our branding and
our signage and the word ‘nutrition’ to show the more
mainstream consumer what we have everything that
they need.”
Greene continues: “As far as how we brand and mar-
ket that, obviously, the big change was the rebranding
of the store signage. So now, on the exterior of that
store, instead of seeing ‘Max Muscle’ in big letters -
which could cause intimidation to the regular person
who thinks they aren’t good enough to go into a more
‘hardcore’ store like that - now, it’s much more inviting
from that standpoint.”
Another aspect of Max Muscle’s rebranding is the up-
dating of its self-published magazine. “We have a mag-
azine that we publish every month called ‘Max Sports
and Fitness,’ which we’re changing to ‘Max Health and
Fitness,’” Greene says. “We just published our 200th
issue. So, we’re very proud of that, and this magazine,
over the years, has evolved with our customer. It used
to be a very hardcore publication; now, it has a much
more mainstream, broad-based approach. It has great
fitness tips, great general information on health and
