Consumer Behaviour in Fitness Centres: a Typology of Customers

Introduction / purpose Knowing your customers and being able to provide what satisfies them is a critical issue for today’s service providers and at the core of today’s marketing paradigm. Knowledge of consumer behaviour helps in effective segmentation and in creating successful service offers. However, consumer behaviour varies across industries and is considered to be multidimensional (Zeithaml et al., 1996). Many researchers have investigated the effect of various factors, such as service quality; customer satisfaction; perceived service value, and cost of services on consumer behaviour in different industries including banks; fast-foods; dry cleaning; athletic services; entertainment; thematic parks, and health institutes (Cronin & Taylor, 1992; Kelley at al., 1993; Cronin et al., 2000; Butcher et al., 2002; Bigne et al., 2005)