The Lunk Alarm…
If you read my blog consistently, you’re likely someone who has bemoaned this Planet Fitness positioning strategy both publicly and privately. If for some reason you are unaware of their marketing efforts, this massive chain of commercial gyms has gone to great lengths to demonize the people that we private sector facility owners typically aspire to put in our own gyms -- the lifters who want to gain strength by “picking things up and putting them down.”
I understand your distaste for this approach to marketing. I can relate to your frustration when clients return from business trips complaining that they were asked not to follow your programming as designed because deadlifting is strictly forbidden. I get it.
Here’s the thing…
Every time you publicly declare Planet Fitness (or similar big box gyms) to be evil or wreckless in the way they glorify their “judgement-free” training space, you hurt your business and the industry as a whole just a tiny bit more.
Most gyms, yours likely included, cater primarily to the general fitness community. As such, you dream of filling your gym with the soccer moms who watch television on their couch after putting their kids to bed.
Just so you know, these people find it nearly impossible to avoid the advertising efforts of the fitness behemoth that is Planet Fitness. In fact, according to Yahoo Finance, this publicly traded company has a shade under $220M in cash on-hand at this moment, which goes a long way toward crafting their desired narrative about the fitness industry as a whole.
Like it or not, the biggest advertising spenders in the fitness industry are naturally perceived to be the voice of the industry as a whole. As a result, many people see Planet Fitness as the typical representation of what maintaining a gym habit looks like, and your business is simply an expensive alternative to consider.
With this in mind, two undesirable things happen every time you choose to vent about this topic:
1. When you position Planet Fitness as the villain in your potential customer’s story, you position the fitness industry as a whole as villainous in nature because of your insistence upon introducing confusion and fear to the narrative. No bueno.
2. You’ve just made your customers feel unintelligent because of their prior purchasing decisions. I say this because most of the people you are looking to sell to have at one point or another paid for a commercial gym membership in their lives (myself included). Your aggressive stance on Planet Fitness and similar commercial gym memberships just made the person standing in front of you feel like a part of the problem. Nice work.
Collin’s thoughts on the advice to come.
Shift your approach…
Here’s what I’m going to tell you...and you may find it to be just as frustrating as my five year old son Collin does every time I send it his way: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
The correct response to any inquiries relating to considered fitness alternatives is as follows:
I’m a proponent of any physical activity that gets people moving and improves their quality of life. If Planet Fitness is your jam, I strongly encourage you to keep on paying for your membership and keep on showing up to get your work in.
Once you’ve pivoted away from negativity, you’ll likely find salesmanship to be considerably less exhausting.
One last thing:
I stumbled upon this blog topic when listening to this fantastic interview with Dr. JJ Peterson. I strongly recommend you check it out if you’re interested in hearing the message delivered in a more coherent and thoughtful manner!
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