Etude de cas swimcenter

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14 Rue Charles Lacretelle, 49070 Beaucouzé

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Today, we are going to talk about the improvement of an existing service: the swimming pool, more precisely Swimcenter. Services are the non-physical, intangible parts of our economy; they are opposed to goods which we can touch or handle. Sometimes, economists refer to the 5 I’s to describe services.

There is first the intangibility, as we said, you can’t touch or handle a service. There is the inventory, you can’t store services. Once the provider delivers the service, it disappears. Then, there is inseparability. Unlike a good, a service can only be delivered and consumed when the provider is present. As a fourth point, we can find inconsistency, each delivery of a service is never the same than the previous or future ones. Finally, to describe services we can talk about the involvement. A service needs both a consumer and the provider to be delivered.

Today, we’ve decided to analyze a special service: the swimming pools. This is the planning of what we are going to talk about during this presentation.

1. Short presentation of the company: history, market, business model, strengths/weaknesses

1. Nature and importance of the elements of the extended marketing mix, in the relevant market

1. Customer journey

     4.   Possible improvements, sensory marketing and ethics

1/ Presentation of the company

Swimcenter is a water sports brand dedicated to aquatic activities for young people and adults. We offer aqua biking, aqua aerobics, swimming lessons, refresher classes, baby swimmers and the treatment of aquaphobia for adults. Created in 2010 by Thomas Jousselin, Frédéric Pierrat and Mathieu Perie, the Swimcenter franchise has developed, in an avant-garde way, a new concept of aqua bike in progress collective choreographed in music. The brand was able to draw on the experience of its directors, founders of the companies Dynam'eau and Swimform in 2005 and 2006, to develop. After the opening of a first center in La Rochelle (17), the brand then explored new concepts by offering aqua gym classes, new musical aqua biking courses... Gradually, the center offered up to 70 courses per week spread over two pools. In addition, the franchise continues to expand, as in addition to its 18 aquatic centers in France, it is currently opening three new ones in Bordeaux Pau and Mulhouse, and eventually wants to reach a rate of 15 to 20 centers per year.

Here is a summary of the company’s history in a few key dates:

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Thus, the franchise offers a multitude of services that it has developed throughout its history:

Soft or tonic aqua gym

Aqua bike

Fitness

Aquatic cardio training

Course against aquaphobia

The franchise also offers classes for all ages, including «Aqua ’Bébé» from 6 months we offer you the opportunity to share a playful moment in aquatic environment with your child to promote his aquatic development. From 3 years your child has the opportunity to participate in our course «Aqua 'Eveil» whose goal is to learn to swim while having fun. From the age of 5 we propose «Aqua ’Grenouille» which will allow the child to build a codified swim. Finally, the franchise offers «Aqua’ Perf» to perfect all aquatic disciplines (front, breaststroke, butterfly, and back crawl). Some centers may also provide a pool under a coach's supervision for birthday parties.

The advantage and strength of Swimcenter is its innovative concept, it is the expertise and the management offered at its various centers. Our offer is differentiating, so we are the only ones to offer this model of qualitative courses in 45 minutes. Since our competitors all offer the same offer our position allows us access to a niche market that caters to the greatest number. We work with a reservation system that optimizes the number of visitors to the pool. In addition, the franchisee has the freedom to provide complementary activities, if these do not distort the original concept. For example, we have franchisees that develop pools for rehabilitation and muscle recovery. Finally, our business is subject to numerous controls. The fact of owning 19 centers, without having experienced any failure, proves that our model is perfectly controlled with a promising and profitable activity.

Swimcenter also has to do with some problems such as the excessive cost of infrastructure maintenance. In addition to representing a major financial cost the set of infrastructures of Swimcenter require an impeccable hygiene that can prove to be a challenge especially when the welcome pools of the courses for young children, In fact, they are more likely to dirty not only the premises but also to cause the change of a whole basin in case of urinary incident (or worse). The Swimcenter centers are not classic swimming pools but sports pools, these establishing a clientele has been a challenge for each franchise center since access to the pools is reserved for people who reserved a yard and who wanted to play sports, what excludes from the franchise’s clientele anyone who just wants to enjoy the pool as in the classic pool model (this is one of the reasons why we developed the product we are talking about today)

In France, society and the State cater to a particular clientele and are therefore positioned on a B-to-C market. In France, the activity of the aquatic sector is divided into 2 parts: public pools and private pools.

The public swimming pools, of which there are approximately 2881 throughout France, are primarily reserved for schools and associations, leaving truly little room for large public activities such as aqua gym or aqua bike. Scheduled on reduced time slots, with many people in the course and often a multidisciplinary lifeguard, the aqua gym and aqua-bike classes are often difficult to practice. The same is true for the treatment of aquaphobia (fear of water) and the

improvement of swimming, activities for which traditional public swimming pools have difficulty meeting demand. Municipalities are increasingly reluctant to open this type of pool because of the heavy budget they represent. It remains possible to practice these activities in certain contexts like thalassotherapy centers or physiotherapists, but they remain small in reception area and expensive. It is against this observation that Swimcenter wanted to create the first swimming centers in France and to offer in addition to the services listed above, a large number of aquatic sports activities offered nowhere else

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