Suppliers as a source of competitive advantage in gyms?

Author: Chano Jimenez. Author of the books: Sell Damned Blessed and Digital Attraction, Doctor in Economics, Postgraduate Degree in Neuromarketing, Master in Sports Management, Master in Business Management, Lecturer and International Consultant for Marketing and Sales for Sports Centers.

We define Competitive Advantage as the possession of some type of asset that does not have competition or does so to a lesser extent, capable of generating superior benefits, in a sustained manner over time. In fact, the competitive advantage should be the basis of business strategy, because it provides the elements of differentiation with respect to the competition.

Based on this definition, a priori, suppliers of assets such as equipment, flooring, software, etc. could not be a source of competitive advantage for gyms, because access to them is only conditioned by the operators' capacity and willingness to buy.

However, this A priorism has an important loophole, because any asset capable of deep corporate customization or closely linked to the company's unique processes or co-developed expressly for the customer, can bring coherence and differentiation to the strategy and, therefore, contribute to competitive advantage.

In short, simple access to a valuable supplier is probably not enough as a sustainable competitive advantage, but it can be of enormous value for the development and application of other sources of sustainable competitive advantage.

Let's look at it with some examples:

• The development of unique products in the market (a true source of competitive advantage) such as our own training systems (See example) may need and is greatly favored by access to body composition measurement providers such as https://www.composicion-corporal-inbody.com/ .

• The undifferentiated offer of online fitness classes that many operators provide to the market is not a source of competitive advantage. However, if this offer is made from a platform integrated into the web itself and, therefore, is perceived as corporate (e.g. On air de https://www.fitcloud.es/ ) and with the possibility of providing a wide range of customizable formats for our own online services and with restricted access, we have an excellent source of competitive advantage.

• Offering circuit training with equipment, in and of itself, is no advantage, because it is very common in many fitness clubs. However, if this equipment has software to program the application of methodologies such as HIIT or HIIST, with the possibility of applying adaptive resistances during exercises, with direct monitoring and feedback of user performance (See Nexa circuit) we find an asset that allows us to develop and apply our own training Know How in a very differentiated way.

Finally, I want to appeal, as Porter (1994) or Grant (1995) would do, to the fundamentals of competitive strategy and highlight that access to certain suppliers can be a source of competitive advantage only if we are able to integrate their resources into our product design, in an attractive way for our customer target, and generating a unique value proposition.

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