Being one of the core elements of brand sustainability and longevity, customer loyalty lies at the epicentre of running a successful business. In recent times, loyalty has become even more sought after, considering the direct access that customers now have to brands with the dawn of social media. While back-in-the-day, loyalty was purely dependent on a brands capability to offer best-in-class services or products, today it relies more on a holistic experience offering. This is especially true in the fitness industry and has become more apparent in the year 2020.

The fitness space is one that’s on a constant path of change. For this ecosystem, it has never been about just meeting customer demands but more on the capability to gain interest and keep people engaged. Pre-2020 the fitness space was relatively cluttered. From brick-and-mortar establishments and the subtle emergence of online players, brands across the board catered to every whim and fancy that the potential audience base was looking for. However, with the pandemic-dynamic the industry was pushed to streamline and enter the digital age, to pivot customers from offline avenues to online ones.

What is customer loyalty?

Every business is started on a simple purpose of solving a particular problem. After an in-depth understanding of what your potential audience has and what they are looking for, the end goal is to provide a truly unique bridge between the ‘haves’ and the ‘wants’. Once that’s been accomplished, the key is to build a set of reliable customers that find value in your product and keep coming back for more.

When you are successful in building this community, which if done right, will keep growing, you have reached a particular point of loyalty. Sustaining this loyalty is a delicate balance between keeping things interesting while not completely deviating from the core reason that drew it in. The perks of loyalty are plenty.

First, these loyal customers now serve as your own personal brand ambassadors, and there isn’t an ambassador as powerful as someone in your potential audiences’ immediate social circle. This is because there’s trust in-built into that relationship and trust is crucial to the entire process. Other perks include everything from boosting sales, strengthening customer relationships, growing the business and helping improve the profitability of making a change.

So now, when we look at loyalty and its correlation to the fitness space, the disruption that’s occurred in the last year becomes clear. While the traditional offline establishments had loyalty, they suddenly weren’t able to give these loyal customers access to keep coming back for more. On the other hand, people suddenly had a lot more time to spare with the lockdown-enabled work-from-home and flexi hours scenarios, and fitness or a renewed focus on their health became more of a possibility.

Digital evolution

Looking back at the evolution of the fitness industry in India, from being largely disintegrated, the emergence of technological innovation and digital transformation have helped put in place a more systematic approach to it. The coronavirus and lockdown helped accelerate this shift. An industry heavily dominated by offline venues saw the emergence of newer, younger brands that were well equipped to the digital means and came with a stronger understanding of what the online customer needed. From virtual training sessions, consultations and streaming, the market suddenly saw a whole new group of customers as well as a whole new set of competition.

With everyone being confined in their homes they were forced to adapt to the concept of digital fitness. But as with any new concept, it came with a set of challenges as well. A focal point of this is a large barrier between users who are actively doing something to inculcate fitness into their daily lifestyle and the people who know they need to but are doing nothing about it. The jump from offline to online because of the pandemic pushed a lot of users over the barrier but unfortunately, they were welcomed by the same roadblock that existed in the traditional fitness landscape.

What most users follow is a cycle where they go from commitment to unrealistic goals to rigorous but short-lived diligence to finally complacency. With this cycle repeating itself almost annually. It was this cycle that the fitness industry had to break to deliver better results in customer loyalty and ultimately the business in the new-world-fitness order. And the key to this was the motivation in any form possible. Users wanted to feel like the platform they’re investing their time in had a vested interest in their progress and goals.

For us at StepSetGo, the concept of tracking and rewarding users for small targets achieved in their step count was what worked. That, paired with a constant stream of motivation via different forms of gamification, social interactions, competitions as well as short term and long term materialistic rewards.

In a market that in the last five years has seen so many new entrants, the only way to attain loyalty is to make sure that your users are constantly motivated to keep to their fitness goals. Most times the onus falls on the user. But the more you can help in adding some positive reinforcement to that journey the more loyalty you will get in return.

The writer is CEO & Co-founder, StepSetGo

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