Customer Loyalty in the Fitness Club Industry: The Role of Club Communication, Customer Expectation, and Perceived Service Quality
Recently, fitness clubs have become very popular among urban Chinese people due to increased health awareness and the lack of outdoor physical exercise space. The study aims to provide an extended view of industrial business-to-consumer (B2C) connections by linking the theoretical steams of marketing communication. The study examines how firms’ marketing communication (FMC) affects customer expectations (EXP) and perceived service quality (PSQ), subsequently influencing fitness club customer satisfaction (CS) and customer loyalty (CL). An online survey was conducted in China, and 300 valid respondents were taken as samples from large fitness club chains. Elementary analyses were done using IBM SPSS version 25; structural equation modeling (SEM) was tested using SmartPLS version 3.2.8. The study demonstrates that FMC is positively linked to EXP and PSQ, which subsequently helps build CL toward fitness clubs in China. Moreover, communication has a negative complementary full-mediation effect on CL through expectation and satisfaction and a positive complementary full-mediation effect on CL through PSQ and CS. Lastly, the theoretical and practical implications of communication on CS and CL in the fitness club sector are discussed.
