Insights from Sentiment Analysis: How Planet Fitness Actually Stacks Up Against Competitors

Purpose of Case Study

Every company has its strengths and its weaknesses. But when you’re a part of said company, it’s likely you see everything through rose-tinted glasses. Instead of settling on your brand’s value proposition on your own, why not let the customer decide for you?

Let’s look at gym brands for example — each with membership costs around the same price point.

Planet Fitness might internally think their biggest competitive advantage is being low-cost or offering convenience of location to members, which is probably very true. But a lot of the time, being the best at one thing doesn’t mean you can freely slack off in other areas — especially if those are areas customers care about deeply.

You can guess that the problem is, it’s hard to know what actually matters to customers and whether or not you’re meeting those needs. Unless you look at customer feedback. And I don’t mean simply reading over a couple of reviews — I mean taking all the feedback you’ve gotten over the years and looking at it holistically to get the full picture.

But that’s not easy to do, right?

That’s why we’re going to do it for you using just the information we already have. We’ll be doing a deep dive into the gym industry to find out

1. What customers actually care about,
2. How gym brands rank across these categories relative to one another, and
3. Where each gym brand's true strengths lie

The Analysis

So we decided to compare Planet Fitness to other gym brands priced at similar membership costs for the fairest comparison. These other gyms include Anytime Fitness, 24 Hour fitness, Gold’s gym, and LA Fitness.

To do this, we collected hundreds of public reviews for each of these gyms and ran them through our Copilot program to start grouping reviews into their relevant categories.

The first thing we discovered was that over 90% of reviews revolved around 5 categories in particular: cleanliness, staff/customer service, equipment/facilities, atmosphere, and membership/payment.

For each brand, our program then classified reviews in each category into either the positive or negative sentiment group. For Planet Fitness, for example, it came up with this breakdown.

What this graph tells us is that Planet Fitness’ performance in each important category is overall more positive than negative. Interestingly, people seemed to have nothing bad to say about the atmosphere as a whole. The worst performing category was staff/customer service.

The gym brand that was complained about the most was 24 Hour Fitness, with tons of customers unhappy about broken equipment and poor facilities, rude staff/service, and difficulties cancelling memberships or with billing.

In order to reasonably compare each of these brands against each other, we looked at the proportion of positive sentiment in each category for each brand. For example, the most-favored gym in every category (except membership/payment) was Anytime Fitness, and the most well-rounded gym ended up being Planet Fitness.

For Planet Fitness specifically, we can see that customers especially value the general atmosphere of the gym the most and are relatively happy with the cleanliness, staff/service, equipment, and membership/payment process as well.

In terms of membership billing, people didn’t seem to have any issues with payment, but they didn’t have much good to say about it either. If we had to choose one, it seems a potential area of improvement could be investing more heavily in staff/customer service.

Meaningfulness of Results

There’s lots to take away here. For example, we know that Anytime Fitness is one of Planet Fitness’ main competitors.

A brief look at our data summary would tell Planet Fitness that they need to step it up in terms of cleanliness, friendlier and more accessible staff/service, and higher-quality equipment/facilities. Because right now, Anytime Fitness is triumphing in nearly every category across the board.

However, what seems to be great about Planet Fitness is that it’s not necessarily performing poorly in any of the categories that seem to matter the most to customers. But if they’ve invested tons into a category that doesn’t appear on this list, they might want to consider shifting some of their time and effort away from those and into these.

And, now that we know what Planet Fitness’ strengths are, there’s opportunity here to hone in on their existing strengths and emphasize them in their future marketing campaigns.

What we can do with these results are endless.

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