Service Experience Report: Applying Marketing Concepts to Hammer's Gym

This report analyzes the marketing services of Hammer's Gym, focusing on service experience and applying key marketing concepts. The report begins with a background on service marketing, highlighting the challenges of promoting intangible services and the importance of strategies like endorsements and word-of-mouth. It then provides a detailed description of a personal service experience at Hammer's Gym, including the gym's offerings, customer interactions, and the author's experience. The core of the report applies the multi-attribute model to evaluate customer attitudes towards the gym, considering attributes, beliefs, and the weight customers place on different factors. Furthermore, the report explores the zone of tolerance, explaining how customer expectations influence their satisfaction with the service. The analysis considers the range of acceptable service performance and the factors that shape customer perceptions. The report concludes by emphasizing the role of service marketing in differentiating businesses and building strong customer relationships, highlighting how understanding and managing customer expectations are crucial for success.

Running head: MARKETING SERVICES - GYM
Marketing Services - Gym
Name of Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

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1. Background:
Many small businesses provide service use various kinds of marketing methods that are
very similar to the businesses that sell physical goods. If taken the example of advertising,
there are not many differences in the strategy used by any of the two types of businesses
(Finne and Gronroos 2017). However, with the businesses providing service, which is
intangible, the difficulty level for promoting these services become an obstacle. Theories of
service marketing provide a clearer picture of the guidelines that the companies can use to
help their business by promoting their service. The first problem that arises is that consumers
can easily distinguish between physical products when they are shopping. However, when it
comes to comparing the services provided by different companies, it becomes a little
difficult. The ultimate lack that services offered has it their lack in ability to be able to
compare physical offerings; the consumer will then have to look at other aspects when
making a favourable decision – endorsements and word of mouth.
Endorsements have proven to be very helpful for business that provide service, rather
than products. Endorsements include past customer testimonials from celebrities who have
assured the customers that they trust the service and it is valuable for whoever would want to
avail the service (Valos et al. 2016). In some way, the next strategy used by marketers for
these kind of companies can also be looked at as a by-product of the first strategy explained.
When a company is able to develop an excellent reputation that encourages customer
referrals, word of mouth becomes one of the strategies that the companies start to rely on.
When the business is able to provide high quality work along with exception customer
service, the organization establishes a groundwork for word-of mouth advertising.
2. Service Marketing – Gyms
Hammer’s Gym, located in Nunawading, is open at all hours of the day with many state
of the art equipment for strength training and cardio. The gym aims to help all individuals
who arrive into the gym with weight-loss, improving muscle tone and gaining strength along
with improved cardio. They vouch for the fact that they are equipped with the best machines
in all of Eastern Melbourne. The gym also offers services in martial arts and self-defence,
which was established almost 20 years ago. The organization claims that they are able to
provide a positive learning experience accompanied with a friendly environment. A first time
customer going into the gym will be looking for some professional assistance during the first
few weeks of their training to evaluate the effectiveness of the gym and the environment. One

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thing that is a great opportunity for the business that has been created is that the Hammer’s
Gym provides a 7-day free trial membership during which the customer has the ability to
cancel their membership before the 7 days without getting charged for it. Walking into the
gym for the first is expected to be daunting for many individuals who have never been to a
big gym, but the friendly receptionist makes the first impression a little easier to handle.
The employees present at the gym inform that the gym has the ability to intimidate many
first time customers; however, they try their hardest to calm the customer and offer them a
friendly and reliable face that they can depend on for achieving their own personal fitness
goal. The trainer first evaluates what the customer would want to see as improvement, and
then provides them with a basic outline of the range of exercises that they should be doing in
along with the diet that they should ideally follow. The trainers at the gym are very friendly
and even though they are all consider the gym their second home, they are very comfortable
with first-time customers in making them not feeling left out and out of place. The customer
in question for this paper kept their membership at the gym for only a month, as he could not
continue to come to the gym due to a busy personal life.
3. Multi-Attribute Model for Evaluating Alternatives:
Before looking at how this theory relates to this paper, it will be important to know what
it means and implies. The multi-attribute model consists of three main components –
attributes, beliefs and weight. Attributes can be defined as the characteristics of a certain
product or service and beliefs are able to reflect the consumer’s opinion on the product or
service to be able to deliver the attribute (Ajzen 2015). In the instance for this paper let us
consider a gym, and Hammer’s Gym is advertising their organizations being one of the best
ones in their region, then the consumers will be expecting better than average service
provided and to not experience any hampering of their experience inside the gym. So, it can
be seen from the example that the organization is making a claim and the customer reflects on
how much they are able to believe this claim through their experience. The weight of an
attribute is how significant it is for an organization.
For different consumers, the weightage that they put on a certain attribute varies by every
individual. For example, considering that, two customers have decided to start their
membership at the gym but they may have had very different motivations that have enabled
them to make the same decision. One customer may be putting more weightage on the
attribute that the gym has a 7-day free trial membership, which will help them make a sound

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decision with all factors in mind. Whereas, the other customer may be putting more
weightage on the fact that the gym is close to their house and it will be easier for them to
maintain a gym-going lifestyle easily to become more active.
The multi-attribute model provides a basic framework for the organization to understand
and effectively assess the behaviour of their consumers and their attitudes towards the service
or product they are selling. This model also helps the organization understand how much
value their customers are putting on the elements of differentiation and with this, marketers
are able to make the necessary changes required in the positioning of their strategies and
making changes to communication.
4. Zone of Tolerance:
The zone of tolerance method is a new and innovative concept that has been developed,
attracting the attention of many service-marketing domains. To properly evaluate the
management of service provided and the consequent consumer behaviour, organizations use
the theory of zone of tolerance (Brady and Arnold 2017). The zone of tolerance has three
distinct applications that may sometimes overlap which are, the description of the state of the
outcome, an outline of the expectations held by the consumer during the pre-performance
stage and finally, the satisfactory range of the consumer who is in process of availing the
service being provided by the organisation. The zone of tolerance portrays the range of the
performance level of the services that the customer has considered to be satisfactory, while
recognizing the multiple expectation standards that each individual may hold, specifically
their desired expectations.
The zone of tolerance differs with every organization along with for every different
kind of product or service that is being provided. Considering the example of Hammer’s gym,
customers walk in with various different expectations and something that may satisfy one
cannot be considered to have the same effect on others as well.

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Looking at the image above, it will be easier to get a visual explanation of the zone of
tolerance. For every product or service that an organization provides, there is always a
desired perfect point and around that point is where the zone of tolerance lies. In this zone, all
values are acceptable. Looking at the image above, this ‘perfect point’ is said to be located in
the area labelled Customer Expectations. The lower and upper limit are something that should
be taken into serious consideration by the organization for their planning of the product or
service they will be providing their customer. It is a wrong misconception that exists with
organizations where they assume that the customer will always be happy if they are given
more, however that is not always true. If a customer walks in to the gym expecting a certain
type of machine and it is not present, the fact that there are so many more machines is not
going to make a difference as they still would not be satisfied as they are not getting what
they want.
5. Conclusion:
Service marketing acts as a key differentiator in the minds of consumers and marketers
are able to leverage on the service that the company is offering so that they can set
themselves apart from other companies in the economy offering similar services. This type of
marketing also highlights the importance of the relationship that exists between the company
and its consumers because a large part of the decision made by the consumer to avail the
service will heavily depend on the degree to which the company is able to fulfil them through
the service that they are offering.

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6. References:
Ajzen, I., 2015. Consumer attitudes and behavior: the theory of planned behavior applied to
food consumption decisions. Italian Review of Agricultural Economics, 70(2), pp.121-138.
Brady, M.K. and Arnold, T., 2017. Organizational service strategy.
Finne, Å. and Grönroos, C., 2017. Communication-in-use: customer-integrated marketing
communication. European Journal of Marketing, 51(3), pp.445-463.
Valos, M.J., Haji Habibi, F., Casidy, R., Driesener, C.B. and Maplestone, V.L., 2016.
Exploring the integration of social media within integrated marketing communication
frameworks: Perspectives of services marketers. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 34(1),
pp.19-40.