DOI: 10.36347/sjebm.2021.v08i08.004

Pages: 219-227

In order to achieve competitiveness and a long-term establishment in the market, fitness studios need sustainable product and service innovations. This is of crucial importance, as customer satisfaction can be achieved through the targeted servicing of customer expectations, resulting in a positive influence on customer loyalty and economic success. All value-added processes of the fitness studio must be geared without restriction to the fulfilment of customer expectations. Findings from studies on motives in fitness sport can help, on the one hand, to take into account the special wishes of the athletes in the design of the offers and, on the other hand, to implement their marketing more effectively due to the more specific target group orientation. The present study provides a motive-related orientation framework for the field of fitness sport on the motivation of long-term participants to exercise. Members of a health-oriented fitness club in a large city were surveyed. The questionnaire consisted of 15 items that can be grouped into seven motivational areas. The questionnaires were available in the fitness club and could either be filled out directly on site or taken home and filled out at home. A total of 350 questionnaires were handed out, 278 of which were completed and returned. The response rate was 79.4 percent. The respondents were members who trained exclusively on equipment. The gender distribution is almost equal with a slight surplus (just under 53%) of male respondents. The mean age of respondents is 56.6 years, with a spread around the mean of 13.1 years. Among respondents with a membership of more than one year, the mean length of membership is 11.6 years (dispersion: 7.5 years). The results show that there is a very differentiated picture of the motives for fitness training. The spectrum ranges from motives named by more than 90% of the respondents to motives named by significantly less than 10% of the respondents. The various 15 motives .........