What Happens When Your Best Customer Gets Older?

I’ve been a Life Time Fitness member since 2013. I joined in my early 40s. I’m now 56.

Over those 13 years, I’ve taken countless group fitness classes, worked out on the fitness floor, eaten at the LifeCafe, tried several services offered in the LifeSpa, spent summer afternoons at the outdoor rooftop pool and visited different Life Time club locations. I’ve stayed because there is a lot I genuinely value about the experience.

But I’ve changed. What I want from wellness at 56 isn’t what I wanted at 43. My body has changed. My priorities have changed. What I’m interested in learning about has changed. What I’m willing to spend money on has changed. And that raises a bigger question...What happens when a valuable customer's lifestyle and priorities change but a company's experience is not changing along side him or her? 

As I started thinking about my Life Time membership as I have aged, I did some research. I discovered MIORA, Life Time’s longevity and medical optimization offering, which includes hormone health and services relevant to perimenopause and menopause. I also discovered ARORA, Life Time's programming and community designed for adults 55+. As a member member for 13 years, I wasn’t particularly aware of either offering.

I went back through the Life Time emails I’ve received over the past month and couldn’t find a prominent callout to perimenopause or menopause. That doesn’t mean Life Time isn’t communicating about these topics elsewhere. I don’t know its internal CRM strategy, its segmentation or what other members receive, but I do know my own experience.

I’m a 56-year-old woman who regularly uses the club and falls squarely within the population that could potentially be interested in midlife and longevity services. As an aside, programs targeted to 55+ is a tricky thing, too. Personally, I have a business during typical working hours. Many of the ARORA offerings are during the day. That would indicate to me that the members taking advantage of these services, meetups and classes are at retirement age, so let's say 65+ for sake of conversation. That said, there potentially is a wildly different need for someone 55-65, versus 65+. But I know 70-year-olds in my dance community who can keep up with the 40- and 30-year-olds, so all "seniors" are not created equally and have different needs. My mom is 77 and we recently walked 20 blocks home from a local festival. Total trooper without any stops. So there you go...

But creating the right offering and making the right customer aware of it at the right moment are two very different things. That's part CRM strategy but more so relevance.

Who is really the customer?

Life Time reports that a significant percentage of its members are under 35. Spend time at my Oak Brook, IL club location during the summer or over the holidays, and you can certainly see it. High school and college-age members can dominate parts of the fitness floor. But membership demographics don’t necessarily tell us who is driving the economics of the membership. So here are the questions I would ask...

Who uses the membership?

Who pays for it?

Who makes the household purchasing decision?

Who buys additional services? (Like spa services and $10 protein shakes)

And who has the potential to continue spending with the brand for another 10, 20 or 30 years?

Those may be very different people. The college student home for winter break counts as a member. But someone else may be paying for the family membership. And when that young adult eventually leaves the household, the person who has been paying for the membership doesn’t disappear, gets older. The bigger question is: Does the brand get older with its members?

An afternoon at the pool on my birthday got me thinking

I spent part of my birthday last week at the outdoor rooftop pool at Life Time Oak Brook. It was a weekday just before Labor Day. Kids were back in school, the summer lifeguard schedule had wound down and the atmosphere was noticeably different. By the way, this location has a full service bar, yes, the kind with alcohol and a kitchen. In the heavy summer months, young college kids man the pool deck taking orders and serving food and beverages to members typically paid for on the member's club tab. What that means is that there are weekends where one side of the deck is like a Vegas-style spring break for adults with a DJ spinning tunes as they say with the other side of the pool chock full of young children and families like a day at the water park just without the slide and lazy river. Anyway, as late morning turned into afternoon, adults began filling the pool area.

At essentially the same time, the operation seemed to be winding down. Poolside service was limited. Some chairs and umbrellas needed attention because they were broken. I had to wait for someone to help open an umbrella. And the rental cabanas which are valuable real estate that already exists were empty. And without lifeguards on deck, young children are not allowed on the pool deck or in the pools at all. For me, I will say, this is heaven. Peace and quiet, adult time. But my hospitality and market research brain kicked in...

Maybe those adults want nothing more than a quiet pool and sunshine. Or maybe there is a different experience they would value once the family-heavy summer season ends. I have ideas about that, but ideas aren’t where I’d start. With my brain in market research mode, I’d start by asking them. I believe there’s a difference between reducing an experience when demand changes, and recognizing that the customer and what the customer wants may have changed. More on that...

Awareness does not translate to experience

Even if Life Time sent me the perfect message tomorrow about midlife health, there is another question. Would it make me want to act on it? Let's take the fitness floor as an example. At Oak Brook, there are times when the strength-training areas are crowded with serious lifters. People occupy machines for extended periods while recovering between sets, texting, scrolling or talking. During school breaks, the number of younger members can make the floor feel even more congested. There is nothing wrong with serious weight training. There is nothing wrong with younger people working out. And rest between sets is part of strength training within reason.

The issue is the cumulative environment. I know my way around a gym, and there are times when even I don’t particularly want to navigate it. Now imagine the woman who has never lifted a weight. She’s 48 or 55. Her body has changed. Maybe she’s gained weight and already feels self-conscious. Maybe she’s navigating perimenopause or menopause. Perhaps someone has told her that resistance training is increasingly important for maintaining muscle and bone. So, she finally decides to take her health seriously and joins a premium wellness club. Then she walks onto that fitness floor...

Does she feel like it was designed for her, too? 

Technically, she has access to everything, but physical access and psychological access aren’t the same thing. A premium brand can create excellent wellness offerings and still unintentionally make parts of its core experience feel difficult to step into for some of the very customers it hopes to engage. If a member avoids a significant part of what she is paying for because the environment feels intimidating, congested or simply not designed with her in mind, that becomes more than a fitness-floor issue. I have experienced those high times of a 90% male population on the level with all of the machines and weights and it can be very intimidating at times not to mention the frustration of waiting for a machine especially when a skinny 17-year-old tells you he needs three minutes between each of his sets. Yeah, ok, see ya, later! 

The gap between 35 and “senior”

This is especially interesting because women in midlife don’t necessarily see themselves as an older-adult market. I certainly don’t. At 56, I’m not looking for wellness to be made easier simply because I’m getting older. I want it to become more relevant nor do I want to be put in a category of "senior." My God, I am a competitive and performance ballroom dancer. I walk, swim and this summer I poured 70 bags of pea gravel for a new patio I built along with 110 bags of mulch around my house. I accomplished this massive landscape project with ZERO help. "Senior?" I don't think so!! 

I am though thinking differently about strength, nutrition, sleep, recovery, bone health, cardiovascular health, cognition, longevity and what I want my body to be capable of 20 years from now. But health isn’t the only thing changing. The two podcasts I hosted in the past gave me different windows into this stage of life.

Through Desperate for a Diagnosis, I’ve talked with patients and experts about what happens when people know something has changed but struggle to understand why or find the right answers. Unhooked comes at midlife from another direction. It explored what happens when women begin questioning expectations, identities and ideas about how life was supposed to look and start deciding what they want now. The more I have these conversations, the more I see the connection. Women aren’t experiencing health, aging, identity, work, relationships, strength, purpose and community in separate compartments. None of it is siloed, I assure you. They’re living all of it at once. There is an enormous business opportunity in understanding that customer. And I’m deliberately going to stop there rather than prescribe what I think it should look like because that isn’t really the point.

Customer retention isn’t the same thing as relevance

Companies spend enormous amounts of money trying to acquire desirable customers. But what happens after they get them? The 35-year-old becomes 45 and the 45-year-old becomes 55. Kids leave home. Careers change. Bodies change. Priorities change. Disposable income may change. Time changes. Yet organizations can continue designing experiences around the person they originally acquired. A customer continuing to pay you doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve continued to understand her.

She may stay because she loves one particular part of the experience. She may stay because her friends are there. She may stay because switching is inconvenient. She may continue paying while gradually using less and spending less because parts of the experience no longer feel relevant to her. Retention tells you she hasn’t left but it doesn’t tell you whether she still feels like she belongs. 

"Belonging" isn't always on the survey or a metric pertaining to attrition rates. 

And that’s why I think the more interesting growth question isn’t always, “How do we attract younger customers?” It may be: How do we become more valuable to the great customers we already have as their lives change? Life Time is an especially interesting place to ask that question because the answer is right there in the name.

A lifetime isn’t one demographic nor is it isn’t one fitness goal, one body, one family structure or one stage of life. The customer you acquired 15 years ago may still be there but she’s just not the same customer anymore. Maybe your next growth opportunity isn’t finding someone to replace her but it may very well be getting curious about who she’s becoming.

If you’re wondering whether your customers have changed faster than the experience you’ve designed for them, that’s exactly the kind of question I help organizations explore. I uncover what customers, employees and leaders are seeing that may not be showing up in the metrics—and where the next opportunity may be hiding.

Curious what you might be missing? Let’s talk.

Laura M. Nozicka is a strategist, qualitative researcher, facilitator and speaker with 30+ years spent helping organizations across healthcare, wellness, hospitality and lifestyle categories really understand what's really going on with their customers and stakeholders, and crafting the story behind the dashboard. She is the founder of Big Idea Tango and creator of the Co-Build Method™, a hands-on informed approach to co-creating with teams and customers instead of around them. Her newsletter Voice of the Room illuminates the conversations that make the story behind the dashboard real.

If you are looking for a fun and interactive keynote on leadership and innovation, check out From the Ballroom to the Boardroom: Why Every Great Idea Is Like Learning the ChaCha. To book Laura: laura@bigideatango.com