The transparency of fitness : A view of transparency management within gyms

Abstract: Did you know that there are over 1500 gyms in Sweden?With personal health becoming of greater importance in Sweden, the increase in interest for gyms have skyrocketed in the last decade. This has created a competitive business environment with over 100 new gyms starting in 2013 alone. In this new competitive environment gyms and gym managers struggle to stay on top in order to increase their customer base. Many managers expand their businesses to offer a broader experience and everyone has a core focus on customer interaction and service. The factor of trust between members and organization has been an important factor in order to retain members. In order to do this gyms have been acting in a clear and transparent manner in order avoid confusion amongst their members. Our study has the intention to discover what tools a manager has at her disposal when managing transparency within the gym industry. Previous research on transparency management has chiefly focused on the financial sectors such as banking and investment. Our goal was to find out how transparency management could be handled in a practical setting within another relevant sector. This leads us to our research question: How is transparency managed within the gym sector? To tackle this question we used theories from three different sectors relating to transparency management. Firstly we used a theory describing the mechanisms in order to control transparency. After that we related this to the notion of trust in order to observe what parts of trust a transparency strategy can impact. Finally, we use theories within the field of communication to establish a transportation device for transparency to reach trust. Our project concerns the actions and intentions of managers and as such we decided to conduct a qualitative study. We held five interviews with top managers of five mediumsized gyms in order to collect enough data to spot trends amongst the strategies. Our conclusions are that gyms manage transparency through having an open agenda by sharing as much information, as quickly as possible. Information is most efficiently shared and adapted to the individuals through personal communication and social medias. In order to support this, gym managers nurture a knowledgeable staff and deal with most communications on a case to case basis. However, our findings display the lack of a clear cut strategy for managing transparency and showcase a room for future improvement.