Phil Wendel and Christine Thalwitz from ACAC have an interesting take on “Why Prospective Members Don’t Join Your Gym.”
I can identify with most of the items on their list of new member fears, especially 2 and 4. I guess I am not the only person in the weight section of a gym who has no idea what to do and fears looking like an idiot trying the equipment.
Gyms should not underestimate these fears in designing the new member experience.
At last count, there were nearly 100 million people playing FarmVille, the popular Zynga game that infests your Facebook newsfeed and begs you to plow land and harvest crops.
Even if tending to vegetables isn’t your cup of beans, FarmVille’s success demonstrates how game mechanics can be applied effectively to motivate desired behavior and outcomes. The game’s immense popularity comes from its wonderfully addictive and simple formula—come back and you’ll get rewarded; don’t check in and your crops will die.
Last week at the TedXBoston Conference, Seth Priebatsch of the gaming company SCVNGR gave a stellar presentation summarizing the future of the game layer. Whereas the past 10 years were the decade of “social”—a la Facebook’s Open Graph—the most critical future innovations in the cloud will be in the game layer, where companies leverage game mechanics to build their customer/user base. Priebatsch highlighted four key principles of effective game mechanics:
1) Appointment-based: Time and location restrictions are incredibly powerful motivators of behavior. In FarmVille, if you buy seeds that harvest quickly—say strawberries—you have to return within 4 hours or the crop will wilt and you’ll lose profits. Limited appointment windows introduce scarcity and urgency, whereas if you leave action entirely up to the user, the action becomes optional. This is no less true in fitness.
2) Social Influence and Status: Foursquare is an example of a community that thrives on individual desire for social status and influence. People vie to become mayor of a restaurant, district, bus route, and other quirky venues—these status rewards are currently location-based. In the world of fitness, rewards should be exercise-based, thereby making fitness a fun habit rather than a draining chore.
3) Progression: Everyone loves seeing their progress towards a goal improve when they take action. Priebatsch highlights the progress bar in LinkedIn as a good example—if you’re at 85% and the service gives you ways to get to 100% (i.e. fill out your profile completely, solicit professional references), that’s a good motivator. In FarmVille, you start out as a “Farm Hand” on Level 1 and can progress to “World Champ” at Level 70. Realizing that levels make FarmVille extremely addictive, Zynga introduced 20 more levels in June 2010.
Everyone loves progression and, correspondingly, recognition for progression. In the realm of fitness, if you burn 250 calories today or lose an inch off your waist size this week, shouldn’t you be able to advance to Level 2? You’d hope so.
4) Communal Discovery: Collaboration around a designated goal is possibly the most powerful motivator of individual behavior. In microfinance, if a group receives a community loan, the whole group suffers if one person defaults and fails to pay back their share. As a result, the whole group feels invested in the success of every individual. While few people consciously recognize the microfinance model as an example of a game, it actually applies game mechanics quite well.
Through surveys that we’ve run at EveryFit, it is clear that most health club members do not feel like a part of a community. Many members highlight that personal training staff don’t know their names and that their general feelings of anonymity make them feel undervalued—put simply, no one else is invested in their success.
The fitness industry should take notice, given that over 40% of new health club members quit each year because they are dissatisfied with their workout experience. While tending to crops may not be the answer, the industry must absolutely leverage game mechanics to retain customers effectively.
That’s all for now. Time to tend my tomatoes…
What does Pink Floyd have to do with quitting the health club? This: 80% of people according to a recent survey** indicate that Time or Money (two Pink Floyd favorites) were the reason they have stopped attending a health club.
At first glance, this is not surprising. We all have trouble making time for the health club and question if it’s worth the money when we can’t attend very often. An expert in the health club industry said it the best: “this is the only industry where people pay to go to work.” If you compare a health club membership to work, it’s not surprising that at least 15 million Americans are leaving clubs every year.
The question is: why do these people join a health club in the first place? Why do they sign up to sacrifice their time/money and to pay to go to work?
They are pledging to put in the time and money to earn a valuable return. When millions of Americans wake up on January 1 every year and decide that their new year’s resolution is to join a health club, they are not signing up for an unpaid job. They are buying in to the promise of a healthier and happier life.
But something goes wrong along the way and many of these new members fall off. And lots of them are leaving in only 60-90 days. Is time or money to blame? No, I don’t think so. I can’t imagine that this many people have their ability to spend time or money change so drastically in only 60-90 days.
The real issue is that the health club is not delivering up to expectations. The return is not there. Because members are not getting results or fun in the first 60-90 days, a health club membership doesn’t seem worth the time and money.
What does this mean? Health clubs have an amazing opportunity to deliver a life changing experience to the masses of people that join every year. The clubs that are focused on providing results (as small as they may be) and fun from day one are having considerable success. They are turning New Year’s resolution makers into lifelong, happy members that do not take issue with the time and money required.
**Thanks to the George Washington University MBA team (Mike, Daren, Trey, Daniel, Douglas and Rich) for running the survey for us.
We want to hear what motivates you to workout. Take two minutes to fill out this week’s health club member survey!
We’ll share the results with you, so stay tuned and thanks for participating!
We’re pleased to launch the EveryFit blog, where we will feature posts on the fitness & wellness industry as well as announce new developments at EveryFit.
We’re committed to helping health clubs engage their members more effectively and have developed a patent-pending solution that incentivizes gym members to make exercise a lifelong habit. The primary beneficiaries of the EveryFit platform are health clubs, corporate wellness programs and, of course, fitness consumers. Stay tuned and please contact us if you’re interested in learning more about how EveryFit can help you!
