A mediating effect of customer retention on the Customer Lifetime Value Achievement among fitness industry in Malaysia: A study on the fitness industry in Malaysia and the creation of Customer Lifetime Value to enhance customer retention

The fitness business is an industry that is receiving an immense amount of attention and growth in Malaysia. With the growing awareness of Malaysians to seek methods to live a balanced lifestyle, fitness has now become a trend in most social media news. However, most fitness gyms are unable to retain their customers for long as these businesses lack the knowledge of creating a concrete and innovative business strategy which provides a direction towards innovation and long-term relationships. Customer Lifetime Value may be the solution to retain quality customers. Fitness studio owners need to apply the knowledge acquired from understanding the reasons members of the fitness studio subscribe to their membership and use that knowledge to invoke or ignite their desire through their business strategy. The inability of management to ‘see the light’ and act upon the concept of investing in customer lifetime value as a more profitable avenue than acquiring new clients prove to be the fall of many organizations in the fitness industry. This business research will be practising the philosophy of positivism with quantitative data being retrieved from members of the boutique fitness studios through a survey questionnaire and data collected from boutique gym owners through semi structured interviews. This is in line with the current research as the perspective of both members and fitness studio owners is taken into consideration. This business research is carried out in the fitness industry particularly with boutique fitness studios in Klang Valley which fills the gaps in academic literature regarding the use of Customer Lifetime Value in Customer Retention Strategies but also in the context of boutique fitness studios rather than big box gyms. The current study is done in Klang Valley, Malaysia which also contributes to the Asian context while most studies have been done in the Western countries