When retailer, the €11 billion-a-year Colruyt Group, decided to get into the health club market, the plan was to fully integrate its entire business using customer insight data. The results are remarkable

The power of customer data to deliver success is highlighted in this issue by our interview with Pieterjan Nuitten (page 32).

Nuitten is MD of Jims, the Belgian health and fitness operator which is part of the Colruyt Group – Belgium’s biggest retailer and a vast and widely-divested €11 billion a year operation.

The company has had a decades-long commitment to the wellbeing of its customers which culminated in the realisation that in order to fully embrace this philosophy, it had to add physical activity to its portfolio

The board of the Colruyt Group made the decision to enter the health club market and set Nuitten the task of buying a gym chain and fully integrating it into the group.

Jims was acquired in April 2021 and Nuitten has been busy since transforming the business and connecting it to the Colruyt portfolio of retail businesses.

With an MBA and a background in retail, he’s been using his expertise in customer insight to inform decision-making around the development of this wellness ecosystem.

The Jims clubs are used as hubs for access to other services within the group. If you’re a cyclist you can get specialist bike workouts, as well as bike fittings and discounts at Colruyt’s retailer, Bike Republic and if you’re looking for healthy eating advice, Jims can assess your nutritional needs and prescribe menus and with one click of the app, all the groceries you need are ready to collect from the group’s supermarkets. These are just a few examples of the integrations already established.

Putting a health club operation at the heart of such a wide-ranging commercial operation is a thrilling concept and ultimately, it’s customer data that’s driving these integrations. Retailers have this at their fingertips – and the expertise to use it effectively.

The fitness sector is starting to move in this direction, with companies such as Active Insights doing regular consumer insight studies and Savanta partnering with UK Active to create the new UK Active Consumer Insight Report, which will be produced each quarter.

With huge interest in wellness from consumers, developments such as those at Colruyt could take us into a new world in terms of monetising the offering.

It begs the question who will get there first? Will more retailers take market share with their advanced customer insight tools, or can health club operators up their game and come to better understand customers, leading to more commercially effective offerings? Only time will tell.

• Pieterjan Nuitten will be a speaker at the HCM Summit in London on 24 October More: www.HCMsummit.live