MANAGEMENT SERIES
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
NEED NOT WANT
Carl Bennett looks at the importance of understanding consumer needs – not just those of your existing customers, but the needs of the community at large – before you refine your product and proposition
D
o you ever stop to think about the needs your services are satisfying? Most club managers will
probably reply ‘yes’ to that question, but I would argue that many are in fact only thinking about the needs of their existing members. Admittedly this is a challenge in itself – analysing the profile of the members in your club, how they group into ‘tribes’, what their needs and motivations are – and one not all operators have yet cracked. But in the end, it’s a matter of member research, profiling, segmentation, databasing… It’s something all operators should, if they put adequate resource behind it, be able to do; after all, with penetration levels static, it’s ultimately the same segments and same member types appearing in our clubs over and over again. But in my mind, if providers continue
to waste time and resources further segmenting the distilled pool of current customers, they lose traction time in engaging those who have far more to gain health-wise. I therefore believe it’s far more important to spend time understanding the needs of those who aren’t yet members of gyms – those who haven’t bought into fitness. Continually reinventing what we already know to better understand existing users is not good enough when 70 per cent of the population remain inactive.
We have to understand and meet the needs of the whole community, and this is a far more complex challenge.
Identifying need Identifying need is therefore a public health priority. It’s the basis on which interventions can be developed that will stand up to scrutiny – that have genuine value and impact. Understanding need is also core to understanding partnership investment opportunities. Need is an interesting concept in itself,
and there are clearly defined needs that any service provider must recognise if they want to ensure their offers match the needs of the public at large. First is the category of ‘normative
need’, which is often defined by an expert or professional. This generally means there are standards or measurements introduced to be able to say a need has been met. In our sector, the physical activity guidelines for children – the need to do from 60 to 180 minutes’ activity a day – is a normative need. Then there’s ‘felt need’, which is what
individuals believe they want. An example might be if someone wants to lose weight: they will seek out information that might help them action their felt need. The issue here is what people want and what people ‘need’ are two different issues. Fulfilling wants drives further want. Fulfilling need fills a
60 Read Health Club Management online at
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It’s important that fitness providers find interventions that get inactive people moving
crucial lack of, or gap in, services across all sectors of the fitness industry. ‘Expressed need’ is what people
actually say they need – a felt need that’s been turned into an expressed request or demand, and which may conflict with a professional’s normative need. You can measure expressed need by monitoring the use of a service or activity. The problem with measuring expressed need is that a service people want might not be available, meaning you can’t measure its use, meaning gaps in service provision can’t be identified. Finally, ‘comparative needs’ can be
identified by comparison between similar groups of clients, some of whom are accessing a service and some who are not. What I mean by this: we can look at the interventions one population accesses and compare these to other areas or populations that don’t have
April 2014 © Cybertrek 2014
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