Content area
Full Text
1. Introduction/purpose
Extensive resources are invested in recruiting new members to health and fitness clubs and it is critically important that those new members recruited become long-term patrons. Thus, as a long-term repeat purchase business with a high degree of customer involvement, it seems clear that customer relationship marketing, service recovery and sales promotion, are very appropriate theoretical frameworks to apply to the health and fitness sector. This paradigm offers the potential to inform thinking on issues of customer relationship marketing, customer recovery strategies and promotion incentives.
This is critically important for membership based organizations and it is widely recognized that sports clubs can benefit from relationship marketing, service recovery and sales promotion principles (Cohen, 1996; Hurley, 2005a). Despite this, there appears to be limited research examining the management of membership organizations in terms of these concepts (Gruen et al., 2000) with the exception of case study work in sports organizations (Lapio and Speter, 2000; Cousens et al., 2001). Indeed Stavros (2005) reports the sports industry to be a poor adopter of relationship marketing practices while an over concentration on current versus lapsed membership has also been highlighted.
Although Thomas et al. (2004) examined the role of price in the customer revival process and Koronios et al. (2017) studied motives underlying repeated participation at high performance sports events, Homburg et al. (2007, p. 462) state that “academic research has largely ignored customer relation revival activities” and since these activities play an important role in business practice, this represents a significant “research gap”. Ballings and Van den Poel (2012) further encourage companies to change the focus from customer acquisition to customer retention, with Olanrewaju et al. (2016) and Ascarza et al. (2018) examining how to reduce customer churn and improve customer retention management, maximizing profits (Lemmens and Gupta, 2020).
2. Literature review
This section provides an overview of the key research areas and authors pertinent to the study including direct marketing, relationship marketing, purchase intentions and customer re-engagement.
2.1 Direct marketing
Direct marketing can be described as a relationship that accommodates and nurtures individualized, personalized and interactive customer engagement. Ansari (2011) attributes the success of sales promotion to its direct impact upon consumer purchase behavior and can include monetary and nonmonetary incentives (Vafainia et...