The signals for the second half of 2022 are conflicting. The budgets of the gyms have started walking again. But not to fly. Personality and energy are the crucial points. The cost of personnel is contained by paying the instructors little and forcing them to invoice with the personal training service to be placed anywhere. A struggle in the short term with a deadly effect on the long run, because more supply lowers the price of everything. And so, the personal trainer is now ten euros.
Fitness 2023: the scenarios
The control over human resources by the club is not for human performance needs, but for get your hands on the extra-service turnover produced by your collaborator “X”. Or to collect the gym rental fee owed by the external trainer “Y”. What sensible strategy underlies less and less quality of the official service of the club in conflict with an external unofficial service on the same (own) ground? And then all these tons of Gbytes of fitness that reach us for free directly on the devices, two thirds of which are of unacceptable quality. Unspeakable and unsellable technical contents that are sold, however. They become gym-competitors.
What is the fitness expense worth?
Under the rain of uselessness the gym client, the last one to deal with, no longer understands what is really worth the fitness expense. And the traditional membership, the simple simple one? What about the solid old enrollment year? Marginalized by the possible goals of the fitness user. Cassato from the commercial strategies of a gym that looks to the opponent and not to itself. And it doesn’t matter if the gym is one or a network. A single gym can be more innovative and agile in setting up projects. What about energy costs? No need to fret. It’s just like that.
Fitness 2023: big hunt for ideas
This 2022 foresaw big hunt for ideas for 2023. The scenario described should have made the fitness management “gurus” develop new revenue strategies, given the impossibility of reducing costs, except to remain with spaces, machines and showers. The only way is to start from the bottom: managerial understatement and daily presence on the field for those who go to manage any gym: pats on the back to those who ease the tensions of a registered customer for the thrill of chatting with an “analogue” instructor-welcoming, not for a scanned PDF that is the same for everyone because … you have to buy the package personal
Up-selling is fine but only if there is detergent inside the health container quality sports fitnesseco-sustainable, to stay in the context of crafty ethics.
Feelings at the end of 2022?
Here they are. Following a long list of feed-backs which at this point I consider as extemporaneous via email, WhatsApp, and a few zooms starting from the immediate post-pandemic, despite having always expressed great enthusiasm in creating a system by proposing comparisons, exchanges, opinions, strategic preliminaries, ideas, hypotheses, it seems to me that they are all convinced that they are on the right track. New ideas? For some of these interlocutors struck by the truth, useless. Symptomatic of a rampant presumption which, like certain ambitions, is the pre-failure stage.
A very humble forecast of customer needs 2023:
- He would like an “analogue” fitness service to go to the gym whenever he likes and not by booking on the App;
- He would like an “analogue + digital” fitness service to go to the gym from time to time but always staying in the community gym;
- He would like a “pure digital” service to go to the gym once a month to have his PSP (non-copy-pasted Personalized Health Protocol) prepared;
- Would like a “service + product included” to buy consultancy services and branded products in the shop and on the platform even if not registered;
- He would like an AR + VR service because this will also need to be prepared.
Simple, very simple: a “penta-membership”.
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