The vice president international of Life Fitness, shares his insight into the future and how the organisation is delivering on its strategy to co-create unique member experiences

What has the fitness industry learned from the pandemic?
One of the biggest outcomes has been a stronger focus on wellbeing. We started to see stakeholders realise that our industry is the solution and we experienced some countries acknowledging that faster than others.

What’s important is the recognition that all stakeholders have a responsibility to convince governments that gyms are essential businesses. This is true now, more than ever.

We know people weren’t happy with the change in their fitness routines during lockdowns – research proves this. As an industry, we saw it at the time, and we’re seeing it now in the percentage of members returning to the gym.

But it’s not about working out in a facility or at home – these two things are not mutually exclusive. It’s about our industry connecting people wherever they want to work out, and ensuring their experience is one that encourages them to keep doing so.

How is this shaping strategy at Life Fitness?
A lot of what we’re focusing on now as a business was already in place. In some instances, the pandemic has fast-forwarded plans, in others, it’s helped us fine-tune them.

Most people lack intrinsic motivation to exercise, so the environment and the stimulus it provides is crucial to getting people active. This is a major factor in members returning to the gym; people want to be with others, somewhere that inspires and motivates them and offers a unique experience.

At Life Fitness, co-creating with our customers to achieve this is at the forefront of our strategy.

It’s also not just health clubs where this responsibility lies. Health and wellbeing should be a part of someone’s work or study culture, travel, and leisure time. But these experiences shouldn’t exist in silos; they can be brought together through open platform technology.

This is something we had in place pre-pandemic, but recent times have only strengthened our belief in the power of this approach.

We want to partner with operators to create experiences for their members not only when they’re in the gym, but also when they’re away from the facility.

What makes your approach special and different?
Before we commit to creating bespoke experiences, we need to first understand what that means to an operator and its members. Anyone can fill a room with equipment, but by working in partnership and collaboration with our customers, we’re able to get under the skin of an organisation and appreciate their story and how that could be translated to serve their target audiences.

Where possible, this co-creation is with team members from all levels of the operation; we outline member personas and develop customer journeys to inform the unique experiences we create.

Our Experience Hubs are one of the tools we use – we now have six Hubs worldwide and growing – and each is uniquely designed to not only showcase what we do, but also how we connect our solutions to our customers’ stories.

Our extensive range of equipment and technology, our ‘family of brands’, allows us to combine products, and the strengths of each brand, into one solution. The Official Hammer Strength Box and Run, Ride, Row concept – developed in partnership with some of our larger international operators – are just two great examples of this.

Our global reach means we see what’s happening across the world and we’re able to use this insight to inform our customers’ plans and share success stories. We also recognise when customers would benefit from support from our partners – we’re not naïve enough to think we can do it all.

Across the world, we’ve developed amazing partnerships to help clubs create experiences that feed into every element of their facility.

What does the future look like for Life Fitness?
Bright! We’ve made some big decisions in line with our strategic plans – choosing not to attend some major trade shows in 2022 and instead focus on more bespoke, collaborative opportunities with our customers is one of these, but we truly believe in our approach.

There are some great examples of clubs doing things differently and in a way that’s true to their values, but the majority of facilities don’t do this well enough.

There’s a real opportunity for Life Fitness to plug this gap and lead the way in helping facilities identify what ‘unique’ means to them and their members. Together, we can then create solutions and experiences that help reinforce the pivotal role that our sector plays in the health and wellbeing of our society.