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Membership characteristics in gym membership longevity
Introduction
a) Membership characteristics correlations
The fitness industry presents a unique challenge: balancing affordability with quality.
A correlation analysis focusing on the monthly price, contract presence, schedule limitations, and club access reveals nuanced insights. A slight negative correlation (-0.077) between price and membership duration suggests that higher prices might slightly shorten membership spans. Conversely, the presence of a contract shows a positive correlation (0.110) with longer durations, highlighting the importance of perceived value in member retention.
Regarding schedule limitations, we can find a slight negative correlation (-0.031) suggesting that schedule limitations might be associated with slightly shorter membership durations. Finally, a minor positive correlation (0.051) indicates that access to all clubs might be associated with marginally longer memberships.
The correlations are generally weak, especially regarding schedule limitation and access to all club variables, suggesting that these factors, while relevant and statistically significant, are not the sole determinants of membership duration.
This makes sense, since in addition to the initial contractual conditions that each member chooses, to analyze retention it is also necessary to study the entire set of utilization variables during the cycle lifetime of the member.
b) Contracts and Gym Loyalty
Data points out that contracts are pivotal in elongating the average duration of gym memberships. Interestingly, the existence of a contract can extend membership duration by an average of 5.1 months. This aspect underscores the role of commitment and perceived stability that contracts offer, making them an important thing to consider in retention strategies.
As can be seen in the chart above, the average duration of a gym membership was longer (20 months) for members with a contract and without time limitations, 6.5 months more than the average of memberships with no contract and with time restrictions.
c) Price and membership duration
Regarding price, the chart below shows 5 quintiles (each contains approximately 20% of price records) where the slight inverse relationship between price and duration can be observed.
The exception is between the first and second quintiles, mainly due to the characteristics of low-value memberships, heavily impacted by gym limited hours.
Conclusion
Even with a modest correlation, price negatively influences retention, whereas the existence of contracts reveals a positive effect. As expected, these factors do not explain, in isolation, the duration of the memberships, but they are important inputs to take into consideration in future commercial strategies.
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