How Behavioral Design Can Transform Your Business

The IHRSA Foundation, the charitable arm of IHRSA, has been busy organizing events and utilizing research to find a way to motivate the 60% of the population who do not exercise. One of the foundation’s projects, United We Rise, generated exciting research by strategic consultants ClearView Insights that applied some of the principles associated with Silicon Valley to the health club industry.

The research was led by an expert in the field of applied sciences, Daniel Krieglstein, Ph.D., executive director of behavioral design for ClearView Insights. A veteran of the tech industry himself, Krieglstein sat down with CBI to discuss behavioral design, the concept of reconnecting, and how it can help lead a “rallying cry” for the industry.

CBI: Explain what behavioral design is and how it applies to the fitness industry?

Daniel Krieglstein: Behavioral design started its journey in Silicon Valley as tech companies started to realize that a click, a purchase order—everything—is a behavior. They found these odd psychological quirks to the human brain. For instance, someone would clearly want a product, but then get to the checkout page and not check out, because there were too many barriers. So, they started talking to psychologists. For us, it was, how do you bring that to a fitness club?

CBI: What sort of methodology and data sets did you use?

Daniel Krieglstein: In building out this “rallying cry,” our team dug into the research to look for gaps specifically between proven benefits of physical activity and how people perceive them. A concept we use when analyzing this type of data is something called eROI: emotional return on investment. It’s a concept developed by my brother, Robin Krieglstein [CEO/founder, Live Neuron Labs]. It looks at every single behavioral choice and its barriers. You want to analyze the mental, physical, emotional, social, material, and temporal variables. Every executive function we have is more fickle and shaky than we like to think—things like memory, focus, decision-making, comprehension, and even forecasting.

CBI: How did you apply that to this industry?

Daniel Krieglstein: In exercise marketing, we sell the healthy future self. But research shows that if people don’t have a psychological connection to that future self, that image—what we call schema—they struggle to make the necessary changes. When they think about their future healthier self, it makes them feel bad about their current self. All it does is emphasize the weight they haven’t lost, their struggles in the past.

Everything we buy has an emotional value before it has a tangible value. And that’s really important to understand; that’s the language of emotion. Everything has that emotional return long before we touch it, feel it. We’re conceptualizing that language of emotion in our relationship to everything.

I was looking at research from Michelle Segar [Ph.D., MPH, MS, member of the IHRSA Medical, Science & Health Advisory Board]. Her work at the University of Michigan shows that we need a more immediate reward—something that’s more tangible on a near-daily basis. This is where the reconnect concepts fit in perfectly.

CBI: Can you explain what that reconnect concept is and how it applies here?

Daniel Krieglstein: Reconnect came out of brainstorming sessions with IHRSA. We had one brainstorming session around childhood, that connection between childhood physical activity and happiness. Not everyone has that, but for a lot of us, playing tag, running around on the playground, it’s just something we can connect to. So, the concept came from making a reconnect to childhood happiness. And very quickly the headlight team realized that the idea of reconnecting to wellbeing is so potent right now because of the COVID world.

We then analyzed the research and found that there is a powerful need to reconnect to our wellbeing every day—a daily renewal. It comes from all types of reasons. Bad sleep, a disappointing day at work or school, or just normal daily depletion of our willpower. There’s so much evidence that, if you need to have a tough discussion with a family member, it’s actually better early in the day before the day’s willpower is depleted. You need that strength to deal with everyday things in life, and you can actually be replenished by going to the gym. The research has proven the emotional benefits of physical activity. That is the reward our clubs can deliver to our members right now, today, and every day going forward.

My favorite quote from the research is, “Waiting to work out when you feel good is like waiting to take an aspirin after your headache has gone.” The idea that our gyms are there for you to reconnect to your wellbeing offers this permanence to the investment from club members.

CBI: How does this messaging work in our “no pain, no gain” world?

Daniel Krieglstein: To the 20% who already go to clubs, the idea of “no pain, no gain,” can be motivating, because they have a habit of exercise and they can easily see the reward. But when we’re marketing to the 80% who don’t go to clubs, they’re hearing, “Hey, come to our club. We sell pain.” And that just doesn’t work because they don’t have the knowledge of reward.

We need to learn the consequences of our messaging both from a health perspective and an equity perspective. A great real-world example of changing the messaging is exercise dance classes. The industry took aerobics classes, something we conceptualize as hard work, and rebranded them as something fun. With dance classes, we help people visualize that eROI in a single class. They’re going to learn dance moves, then go to the nightclub this weekend and show them off. It’s an easy sell.

The eROI sits in their head—they know what they’re getting into. We need to ask ourselves, will the next convertible member perceive the immediate reward? Do they see the dance class in the same way?

CBI: The “language of emotion” is a phrase I encountered in the report. What does that mean in this context?

Daniel Krieglstein: It means that every word clubs use to communicate goes through that same eROI calculation in the consumer's mind. To call them dance classes instead of aerobics, it changes the calculation in their minds. But, more importantly, you need to win that eROI battle for attention at every other competitive stimulus. Every single word needs to pull its weight in rewarding the behavioral mind. Even with competition from our apps, phones, and streaming TV, we look for that dopamine drip socially in real-world experiences, and we can get it from our gyms.

Your messaging has to improve the member's emotional journey with your club. That’s how you create value. It needs to be in your advertising, your communications, your branding, even in your introductory paperwork.

CBI: Doesn’t this language of emotion change with each demographic?

Daniel Krieglstein: There’s not a cookie-cutter emotional relationship. The research shows that each club needs to discover and emphasize its own emotional journey. It starts with identifying the eROI that your existing members are already being delivered. Then you can start to look at people in the relationship a little bit differently than by class, race, and gender. That’s a benefit. When you start to build those behavioral journeys around eROI, it allows you to step out of your own biases.

First, you have to look at where your strengths are and assess the barriers to entry. Once you identify those key variables, then you can start to build a new behavioral journey that optimizes the conversion experience. Then you can build out what we call behavioral segments or behavioral personas of your club’s next convertible demographic. This leads you to discover your club’s easiest operationalized persona, except we describe it in behavioral and eROI terms, emotional returns, instead of traditional physical demographics.

CBI: What would be an example of this?

Daniel Krieglstein: An example of a barrier to entry for a new member is one I had during a recent gym walk-through just before COVID hit. I had to spend five to 10 minutes filling out paperwork before I was even allowed to walk through the club to see if it was for me.

So, I’m immediately put to work when I walk into the gym. Then I spend the next 20 minutes walking around, where a salesperson just points out different spaces in the gym. There’s no emotional connection, no emotional positive return.

Psychologists call that cognitive “frames.” It makes it harder for me to visualize what it would be like to be a member. And those are the types of journeys that, in the tech world, they look for in A/B tests. These tests identify those key conversion points where drop-off is likely, where people are making buying decisions in real-time.

CBI: So, this is what big tech companies do, right?

Daniel Krieglstein: Yes, this is the same type of applied science Silicon Valley uses to make those apps so appealing. But you don’t need to build these crazy, huge logic maps where you show every possible choice a person can make in relation to your brand. But you won’t know what the barriers are to people joining your gym until you test it.

I’ll use my dad as an example of how this works. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and all the research said he needed to start moving. He was a very active person his whole life, but in retirement, he had never joined a gym. The idea of a gym just didn’t sit with him.

He’s central European, and I explained to him that the gym down the street had a sauna. He says, “I like saunas.” So, he went there for almost half a year to just use the sauna. Then in discussions with the other elderly guys there, he was finally convinced to try a Zumba class, then a boxing class. It was an easy entry.

My dad just couldn’t perceive himself at a gym, but I convinced him that he could just use the sauna whenever he wanted, and eventually, that behavioral conversion was broken down.

For more information on this important initiative, go to hub.ihrsa.org/foundation.