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Chris Bey hopes to make Chris Bey fans into wrestling fans
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If you follow Chris Bey on social media, it will quickly become apparent that he does a great job promoting himself. The 24-year-old star has only been in the business for three years, but he already has a solid grasp of how to differentiate himself from his peers even outside of the ring.
"I think for a lot of that stuff, it's about me trying to be something different than what I've seen," Bey said. "Like what I was talking about earlier how, you know, we all come from different walks of life. I try to look at this as, you know, what I would really participate in outside of wrestling. For my first year, I felt a little more lost because I was trying to play whatever the part of what the wrestling would be. I was taking in all these super, you know, oiled up like promo pictures and I was cutting these more generic type promos. And it wasn't until I realized that what I'm going to do inside the venue is going to be wrestling regardless, so what I do outside the ring has to be different."
"And as far as the merchandise, I’ve always looked at it as if I wouldn't wear it, then I wouldn’t drop it. And I remember as a kid wearing a wrestling shirt, there would be times where you wear a wrestling shirt everyone’s like, 'oh, you like wrestling' and it’s this negative stigma to it or you wear that one wrestler’s shirt who, you know, you didn't quite know was a wrestler’s shirt and people are 'yo that shirt’s sick.'"
Chris Bey revealed that his approach to coming up with fans is distinct because he doesn't market to only wrestling fans. He tries to reach fans that may not watch his matches and get them to look at what he and others are doing with IMPACT.
"So I always kind of approached it from my own personal experiences in that scenario where it's like, OK, well, can I have a lot of fans who aren't wrestling fans, they're just Chris Bey fans. And for me, it's important that they have something that they can wear and it doesn't scream this is a wrestling shirt, I'm a wrestling fan rather than this is a Chris Bey shirt and have people go, ‘oh, well, who's Chris Bey?’ And they go, ‘Oh, he's this wrestler, he's this musician.’ And then people tune in to see my work and through them seeing my work, of course, it's a two-way sport. So they're going to see me wrestle someone else who is, especially if they’re tuned into IMPACT on Tuesday nights, they will see me wrestle someone who's of excellent caliber, and then they'll be able to become a fan of our product and a fan of, you know, not just myself, but whoever I’m in there working with."
"And, you know, that's kind of the mentality I have. It's honestly just a sense of me wanting to or having to understand that it has to be different and it has to be different than everything else that I'm seeing and everything else that I'm feeling. No one actually helped me really learn that. It was just something that I adopted through the course of realizing who my actual fanbase was, rather than being, you know, 100 percent hardcore wrestling fans, because it's not, you know."
Next: Chris Bey on the chance of him forming a tag team with IMPACT
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Edited by Atharva Papnoi
