Imagine: a gym that wants customer success
Customer failure by design.
In most cases, it comes down to dollars and cents. In a service industry like ours, every single active member means higher costs. Between increased staffing and quickly deteriorating towels—it just costs more to have engaged gym-goers.
Lucky for the big fitness industry, the customer failure model is working well. A full 25% of people with gym memberships attend less than once a month, and the majority attend less than once a week.
This is not a happy accident, or corporate good fortune produced haphazardly by the New Year's rush. It’s a product of design. It’s the product of pricing just low enough that the customer doesn’t have loss aversion. It’s the product of gym design which draws in novices while making it harder for regular gym-goers to work out. Most importantly, it’s the product of occasional free pizza nights.
Consumers are picking up what our industry is putting down.
As we said last week, a customer-centric version of personal training is becoming the norm in the market. Over the last year, our customers have had amazing experiences with online and at-home options that offer them the kind of flexibility that they need while reducing the friction that a simple walk to your local gym creates.
People are changing their tunes on gyms—and for good reason.
As of March 2021, 35% of U.S. gym-goers don’t intend to return to their gym even post-vaccine. For a lot of people, it’s because they’re getting wise to the fact that gyms are not set up to help them succeed. In fact, a December survey from the same organization showed that only 15% of gym members thought that gyms were the best way to stay in shape. That’s a 64% year-over-year drop—taking gyms from the #1 way to stay in shape, to the #3 spot.
Most of these gym-goers are instead excited about at-home and outdoor solutions. As trainers, we know these are good options. But hope isn’t lost.
Maybe it’s the industry’s fault?
Yes, COVID-19 has completely shifted people’s perspectives on exercise (among other things)—but maybe there’s some blame to be put on big-box gyms here.
The bottom line is that people are moving away from gyms because they’re realizing it’s not the best way for them to get and stay healthy. And, as we said at the beginning of the article: that is by design. We (or...big fitness) have been limiting our customer’s ability to succeed for so many years—and we’re paying the price now.
The best part about this realization, for us at least, is that it’s a deeply changeable thing. We can move into the industry and do something very different than our big-box competitors.
We can design for customer success.
So, let’s design a better way.
It’s possible to build a gym, and an approach to training, that actually empowers customers to do the best work out of their lives.
At Motus, we’ve spent the last several years trying to do exactly that. We’ve been building a space that doesn’t hide weights and doesn’t over-promise to customers. We’ve learned from the practices of big-box fitness, and we’ve decided to run in the exact opposite direction. We’ve built a space that is flexible for every trainer who makes it their home base. You can make the space your own, and make sure that it fits the specific needs of your clients and groups.
It’s a space that lets the trainer define success, and affect it in a way that serves this success. This is what we’re advocating for generally: focus on your unique approach to client success and pick spaces that genuinely suit those goals. Maybe it’s outside, maybe it’s the gym, maybe it’s through a Zoom call.
The important piece: design spaces, programs, and workouts for your clients. It’ll be the key to business recovery—and ultimately it’ll be the thing that keeps people away from big-box gyms, but coming back to you.