We are fortunate enough to be promoted in the Telegraph today both online & offline – see the shots of the physical newspaper like substance thing which we are in. And here is a link to the offer online as well: Wahanda Spa Day Discounts
Just use the promo code TELEGRAPH at checkout to get 15% off
Always really liked their decorations, although NY store does it better
Representing Wahanda, my business partner Lopo & I recently gave a speech at the SIBEC Fitness industry conference where our talk centered around how the fitness industry can better address the issue of retention and acquisition. See the attached pyramid below which was a slide in our presentation and which really drives home the points that in addition to making it easier for customers to sign up for a gym, fitness service companies need to do a better job of retaining their customers
Amazingly, although 95% of the population understands that fitness is important, only 12% of the UK population has a gym membership. And with the significant churn, or lack of retention, only 8% of the population maintain their membership after 12 months. This shows that there is a significant opportunity to not only attract customers, but to retain them and deliver a better customer experience that drives better word of mouth.
At Wahanda we have started working quite intently with gyms and the fitness industry and have already started getting fantastic traction with our fitness deals and offers, especially with Pilates and Power plate & vibration training, and with gyms such as Harpers, Nuyuu Fitness, 3D Leisure, Topnotch Health Clubs, xPect Leisure and soon more to come. We want to help the fitness industry reach out to the broader population, and we feature a ton of free fitness offers and deals so customers can get an idea of what each facility has on offer.
The Esporta Gym & Fitness chain, which has over 55 locations throughout the UK, has had a hard time recently since it underwent a leveraged buyout in 2006. According to the Times, Esporta has a difficult time retaining customers, hinting that customer service was not the best it could be:
"(Greg Feehely – an Altium Securities analyst) said that Esporta had not been good at retaining customers, an issue that its new management must address quickly. Esporta had retained an “old-fashioned business model” of signing up customers to inappropriate contracts and threatening to sue them if they wanted to leave, he said.
….Esporta had already moved to address this issue by offering lower monthly fees to customers willing to sign up for longer contracts, adopting the approach that mobile phone companies have taken to improve profitability and tie down subscribers to longer deals."
Google must really feel that they do not need friends, or that they need more enemies. Either way, once again they are pitting themselves against some of their biggest advertisers by announcing the launch of an online property portal business in the UK. See below for how Rightmove’s share price reacted to the news… Rightmove being the biggest competitor to Google in this space.
Similar to when they launched Froogle (which failed), or even Google Base (again not a success), Google are trying to cut out the other “middlemen” by providing their own service. Similar to Froogle (which targetted online e-commerce merchants) and Google Base (listing businesses), this new venture also targets the middlemen who are actually large advertisers on Google’s Adwords and other ad platforms, so its an interesting move. I have the word “frenemy”…I think officially its probably straight up “enemy” now.
Excerpt from the FT article below:
“This sounds like a serious problem for Rightmove and others like them, depending on the model Google uses, but eventually it will affect every-one and newspapers will suffer another chapter in the story of consumers being more and more aware of alternatives to their classified advertising.”
In Martin Varsavsky recent blog post, Why Europe’s GDP is the largest in the world, the author makes a controversial statement stating that the lack of spending on education in the US may be one of the causes of higher rates of incarceration vs. countries in Europe. I would have to remind the reader (and the author) that this type of statement is a common error that confuses correlation with causation – just because two things occur simultaneously, that does not make them automatically related. The specific quote is below, and some more commentary on causation after the quote:
“Education in general and university education and training in Europe is mostly free. Education and training in USA is occasionally free but frequently extremely expensive. In the end the entrepreneur in USA has to pay salaries that allow his/her employees to educate their children. Moreover expensive education spills over in other areas of society. Europe has an incarceration rate of less than 100, USA has an incarceration rate of 750 people per 100K inhabitants. In my view there is an inverse correlation between spending on education and incarceration that favors Europe. If all US prisoners were moved to a city they would overflow Madrid. Maybe spending less in the military and more in free education would have a more beneficial effect on society.”
To substantiate such a broad statement and to show causation, there would definitely need to be more research into things such as crime rates by country, arrest rates, arrest release rates, number of police on the streets per capita, types of crime people are incarcerated for, among other crime stats. You would also need a sample from a cross-section of countries, and then look into causal factors and see how dependent the output is on the lack of spending on different types of education, and more importantly the literacy rates, education “reach”, level of education for those in prison and the general populace. I can understand the author’s trying to link the two seemingly related factors, but it is an extremely weak link and one that would need additional investigation.
