The Gym Group has sought to gain an edge in the competitive budget gym sector by commissioning a statistical model to understand the impact of price changes on member acquisition and retention.

Budget gyms have harnessed technology and data-driven insight to become the industry’s biggest success story of the last decade and The Gym Group has been at the forefront of this. The new data model – created by Retention Guru Dr Paul Bedford and respected fitness industry consultant Rob Gregory – will enable the company to make strategic decisions about pricing and promotions that will have a direct link to products and services.

“We have invested heavily in technology to underpin our business model and this infrastructure enables a wide breadth of high fidelity data across our 1.6 million member records,” The Gym Group COO Jim Graham told Health Club Management.

“We believe that this analytical work, coupled with our combined insight into the human psychology of engagement with and adherence to exercise, is really adding value to our members and will further differentiate us from less data-rich operators.”

The data model included analysis of more than 800,000 member records from 50 of The Gym Group’s UK sites and took six months to complete. Dr Bedford said The Gym Group’s extensive use of technology means they have collected vast amounts of data about members and their behaviours, enabling analysis of a variety of behavioural attributes, some of which have not be analysed before. The model also enables future scenarios to be tested based on changes in the dataset.

“The low cost market is becoming increasingly competitive and improvement at the margin is the key to success,” added Gregory. “So it was important for The Gym Group to develop a retention strategy that focuses on the areas that have the greatest impact on profit.”