How to market health clubs

I hate tomatoes… I always have from as long as I can remember.

If I try to eat one I will gag and have to spit it out.

As you might imagine I am not a big tomato consumer… I am not going to be influenced by tomato “marketing” too much. I’m not going to care about “the freshest”… “the juiciest”… “organic”… “the cheapest”… “the best value”…

If you are coming at me with this kind of marketing you are making it easy for me to ignore you… in fact, you are doing me a favour because I actually want to ignore you.

Here’s the interesting fact… I eat scores (maybe even hundreds) of tomatoes every year.

Huh?

I eat tomato sauce (ketchup) on everything, I like tomato soup, I eat tomato paste, I eat spaghetti sauces…

When I tell people that I hate tomatoes but I eat all of these tomato based products they seem more than a little bemused. Of course, they ask me why I don’t eat tomatoes but do eat all of these other tomato based products?

The answer is simple… they don’t taste like tomatoes.

All of the additional ingredients and various cooking processes apparently remove the tomato taste that seems to offend my palate.

You see I don’t have a tomato problem… I hate them… no problem. But I do have a tomato sauce, tomato soup, tomato paste, spaghetti sauce problem.

Here’s the point… most conventional industry marketing fails by trying to sell health clubs to people who hate (for a variety of reasons) the existing health club offerings because health club owners/managers are better at marketing to themselves then they are at marketing to the rest of the world.

The way to reach the people who hate health clubs is not to tell them about your health club (you are not going to change their mind with an ad) but rather to tell them about a health, fitness, or wellness problem they have… and let them decide that you can help them with it.

They don’t have a health club problem… so they are not looking for a health club solution.

They have a weigh loss (or self-esteem, self-image, fitness, energy, sporting, new dress, class reunion, suddenly single and dating again…) “problem” and once your message resonates with their actual problem you have earned the opportunity to pitch your solution.

Of course, your solution then has to meet, or exceed, their expectations… marketing is not magic.