Blog 142: Health Club Marketing to the Grey Market

A grey market is a common way of defining an elderly population. Although, the grey market is becoming more healthy, wealthy, and “youthful” due to the advances in modern medicine and the longer life expectancies of today’s population. So just because they are older, do not discard them as non-prospective members.

Targeting the grey market is a lot more financially rewarding than most health club marketers understand. In today’s times, we are dealing with the baby boomers now going into retirement. These baby boomers were consumers who did and do whatever they want. They live how they want and they really live life with gusto.

Baby boomers have already raised their families, sent their kids to college, and have done their primary spending over the past 30 -40 years. Now that they are going into retirement they are downsizing their homes, they are getting rid of the big house, going into smaller homes or even condos and they now have expendable income.

Most people in their retirement age are living on a budget. Well, the grey market is probably living on a budget too, but that budget probably is a lot larger than you think. Targeting the grey market is going to give you an edge on the competition.

A lot of health club marketers when they think of their ideal targets; they want prospective members between the ages of 30 and 60. But that was health club marketing from decades ago; they are still living in the past. Now prospective members are training well into their 80’s and have been very active most of their lives and plan to continue being active because we, as a nation, are far better educated in the benefits of health and fitness throughout their entire lives.

I understand that a lot of health clubs don’t like to target the grey market because they are afraid they will be in the health club training every day and beating the system. But “most” of the baby boomer (not the few hundred that are core members) market are still very active with their business, investments, charities, and different social activities that they are not going to commit to training 3-5 times a week.

No matter what that 11% is, it is still 11% of the population that is the health and fitness conscientious. You don’t have to be concerned about that or build your business model around the fear that, a lot of these baby boomers are going to be training 3-5 times a week for the rest of their life. Just like anything else in life, everyone is enthusiastic in the beginning; so they might train a lot in the first three months but after three months, they will cool down and they will get back into the rhythm of their normal lives. They will go back to training again once or twice a week because the newness will wear off.

Targeting the grey market is easy for opening up additional revenue streams and different opportunities to grow your health club and your health and fitness career.

For more free tips on increasing your health club membership base through health club marketing, health club promotions, professional health club membership sales, and advancing your health and fitness career visit us today @ www.healthclubmarketingmmc.com or call 904-448-5727.