There is frequent talk of the need to orient companies towards customers, not towards products. In the case of sports facilities, this orientation is carried out on too many occasions towards service, promoting activities, new services… with the aim of keeping the facility alive and maintaining a good level of supply.
This is important, but in reality the process should first consider the figure of the client and with him their needs and desires, because, in the end, when a client is interested in our center, with the information we offer, we are doing it above all a “promise of value” that we should keep.
In this sense, we should bear in mind that there are many marketing strategies that are perfectly applicable to our company, as long as we are also clear that we are not working with a need for possession or consumption but, on many occasions, with a desire to improve health or fitness.
We should never take any internal action without putting our customers as a starting point. For this, the most important thing is to know them, otherwise it is impossible to meet their needs.
Obviously, a good offer of services is convenient, but let's not forget that in Spain sports facilities have a customer turnover ratio of up to 50%. That is to say: 50 out of every 100 members leave our center because the “promise of value” that we made to them in their day has not been fulfilled, we have not been able to explain or sell the benefits obtained or simply these benefits have not existed. It is clear, therefore, that duplicating or copying services and activities is not proving to be a good strategy and, in any case, we should at the same time have much more information about the reasons for which a client causes registration in our installation and also about what it is. the cause that motivates a loss.
En el sector del fitness, la oferta de servicios ha ido cambiando paulatinamente en los últimos años: las artes marciales y el culturismo han dejado paso a conceptos vinculados con el bienestar y la salud, las actividades coreografiadas y los ejercicios de “alto impacto” están dando lugar a nuevas actividades como el ciclismo indoor o las últimas fórmulas de trabajo de tonificación con elementos añadidos (Body Pump, etc.). También estamos siendo testigos del nacimiento de nuevos conceptos de servicio basados en la personalización máxima y los “trajes a medida” para el usuario: Personal Training & Pilates…
All this is not by chance, it is about an orientation of services based on increasingly notable facts in our society: the increase in per capita income, but also in life expectancy, the extension in time of people in good health. A state of health that only twenty years ago we considered “older”, and, above all, population growth –which creates a large contingent of the labor force in developing countries– leads to the consumption and production of more and more services.
However, the search for operational efficiency in public services (such as producing more or reaching more consumers while minimizing costs and complying with certain “social objectives”) and the increasing industrialization of services have led us to rapid growth that we it overflows in some communities and, incidentally, has plunged the private sector into a constant problem of competitiveness. The possible solution for this would be a good dose of creativity and imagination.
All these aspects give us an easy and clear reading: there is a part of the sector capable of creating and taking advantage of its operational advantage at the cost level, low-cost access to technological innovation, standardization of productivity and supply and sustainable development of strategies. of marketing that generate more and more users.
But can we admit that we are creating satisfied users or satisfied users?
The current reality is that we belong to a sector that, like everyone else, tends towards standardization and globalization, and that this standardization of services takes advantage of a strong demand that generates three immediate symptoms:
1. Low investment in customer loyalty
The reality is that in general we invest too much in communicating what we offer and pay little attention to internal flows (the -how- we offer it). We have constant attacks of Marketing myopia, investing large amounts of money in attracting customers, designing campaigns, creating strategies and promotions… but it seems that we do not realize that our migration rates are the same as five years ago.
2. The systematic copying of services and concepts and non-creativity
We also invest little time in creating internal information and training traffic in our companies. This slows down creativity and is aggravated if we take into account the lack of knowledge we have about the "promise of value" that our client asked us to sign up, and in the end, fulfilled or not, on too many occasions we choose to copy what the company does. competition, with the confidence to fight with the same weapons (but the “promise” is still there even if we have decided that this issue does not suit us).
3. Non-differentiation with respect to the competition
The result of all this is that when the difference becomes something more objective than a few square meters more or less, more or less machines, and more or less casualties, we face a problem of systematic imitation of services, sales concepts and messages, and this is not creative.
Let's get creative
Yes, but not clumsy. In the first place, we should reorient our company towards the center of any business strategy: the customer and, for this, we must know them thoroughly and know ourselves in depth. Some successful companies adopt values that are also fundamental when we talk about health:
- Believe and want to be the best at something, not at everything Believe in the importance of people (customers and workers) Believe that our service can always be improved Design those improvement tools or find someone to do it Have a clear mission and corporate orientation
It is clear that to know where we are going, we must know where we are, and this implies knowing in depth the capabilities of our staff, their level of involvement, the operating costs that we face or the various management indicators that we have to manage with the in order to evaluate any action.
Managing the information
Once all the indicators have been analyzed, we can assess whether an injection of creativity can really help us, but it is essential to determine beforehand if:
- Do our services give us a differentiating position in the market? Do we provide tangible benefits tailored to each client or rather do we offer a unique benefit for one or two types of clients? Do we satisfy the wishes of our customers? (It is important to note that a wish can be different from a tangible result, since we are also talking about experiences).
Once we are clear about all these points, we can evaluate with enough data in which part of our business structure it takes a little creativity to solve a problem. For example when:
- We have identified that a large percentage of our casualties correspond to an age group or sex. When the management indicators reflect that our costs are subjectively distributed also on our services, but we do not know the objective profitability of each of them. We have surveyed our clients and determined that aspects such as personalization, extended hours of activities or the achievement of results are important to them.
Let's talk about health
It is interesting to note that sports services are increasingly related to benefits related to health and quality of life, and this has led to a change in the behavior of our clients. We must bear in mind that:
- The purchase of health services is rational, that is, it is based on needs and is rarely bought on impulse. The client who values her health generally mixes needs and possibilities, for this reason she is a very proactive client also to access aesthetic services, programs by objectives, etc. The consumer of health services can be educated in aspects related to sports services. However, the systematic entry of concepts related to health requires retraining our clients on the values and direct benefits with which they will be able to count on the new services or strategies that we implement.
Ethics in sports companies
Marketing techniques can be adapted to health and sports services without any ethical restriction, in terms of market studies that identify the needs of our internal or potential audience, communication techniques that seek to disseminate related aspects on how to improve the quality of life, etc. But it is no less true that the health concept now goes beyond the benefits of sports and physical activity in our body: now we are talking about special populations, osteoporosis, back pathologies, aesthetics and diseases typical of the developed world: coronary problems, stress, etc.
An excessively "creative" orientation of our services may lead us to think that if we communicate that we can serve certain clients, we will surely serve them and increase our business profitability index. And this is completely false and attentive to point 2 that we mentioned previously.
Ethics therefore requires scrupulous respect for the priority of professionalization and training over any aspect related to communication or marketing, because in the end what we are are health and physical activity professionals. And we can be more or less creative, but never more or less professional.
