4 ms·

I'm amazed at this point, given the "subscriptions are a nightmare to cancel" meme, that nobody's turned that into a marketing message. Some of the gym ads say

by hakfoo 3y ago

I'm amazed at this point, given the "subscriptions are a nightmare to cancel" meme, that nobody's turned that into a marketing message. Some of the gym ads say "cancel anytime", but "sure, just bring in this blood-endorsed document countersigned by at least five Supreme Court justices" is still implied. Services that say "prepay up-front and we'll never bill you" is a viable selling premise. Gift subscriptions are an obvious viable business that comes out of that model. I wanted to get my father a gift subscription to the local newspaper, and they basically had no idea how to handle a fixed-term subscription-- all they could point to were recurring auto-pay setups.

jyunwai 3y ago
In 2016, a gym in Canada had a news article written about it in The Globe and Mail, a national newspaper [1], due to the notability of its policy at the time of only offering a pay-as-you-go plan. You would pay each time you visited, until you hit a cap at a maximum fee per month—this would make future visits free for this period. The marketing clearly worked, as the business earned a national news article solely due to this policy. However, after some time, the gym changed the policy to offer discounts for people who signed a contract—effectively make it more expensive for people to pay-as-you-go without easier cancellation. As of now, I can no longer find pricing on their website (maybe it's there, but I've looked around a while), nor any mention of their once-notable pay-as-you-go model. Instead, the gym's website now focuses on encouraging members to sign up for a personal trainer. At least in this case, the gym showed that the "prepay and we'll never bill you" policy was, as you predicted, a headline-grabbing policy. But it appears that the owners decided it was more profitable to either cancel or de-emphasize the policy and promote the usual payment model for gyms, even at the cost of standing out from other gyms. [1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-growth/the-challenge/pay-per-use-gym-offers-contract-free-workouts/article29249178/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-bus...

by hakfoo 3y ago

jyunwai 3y ago

In 2016, a gym in Canada had a news article written about it in The Globe and Mail, a national newspaper [1], due to the notability of its policy at the time of only offering a pay-as-you-go plan. You would pay each time you visited, until you hit a cap at a maximum fee per month—this would make future visits free for this period. The marketing clearly worked, as the business earned a national news article solely due to this policy. However, after some time, the gym changed the policy to offer discounts for people who signed a contract—effectively make it more expensive for people to pay-as-you-go without easier cancellation. As of now, I can no longer find pricing on their website (maybe it's there, but I've looked around a while), nor any mention of their once-notable pay-as-you-go model. Instead, the gym's website now focuses on encouraging members to sign up for a personal trainer. At least in this case, the gym showed that the "prepay and we'll never bill you" policy was, as you predicted, a headline-grabbing policy. But it appears that the owners decided it was more profitable to either cancel or de-emphasize the policy and promote the usual payment model for gyms, even at the cost of standing out from other gyms. [1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-growth/the-challenge/pay-per-use-gym-offers-contract-free-workouts/article29249178/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-bus...