Abstract Book of the 7th International Conference on New Trends in Management, Business and Economics
Year: 2025
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Drivers of Sustained Engagement with Online Fitness Services: A Customer Empowerment Framework
Chun-Der Chen, Chia-Hung Hsieh, Cheng-Kuei Huang
ABSTRACT:
The COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2023) accelerated the adoption of digital platforms, profoundly impacting the fitness industry as users shifted from physical gyms to online services. This study investigates the factors influencing users’ continuance intention and willingness to pay for online fitness services, employing a customer empowerment perspective. Focusing on the interplay of structural, social, and psychological empowerment, the research examines how these dimensions sustain user engagement in a post-pandemic digital landscape. Data were collected from 365 Taiwanese users of online fitness platforms via a questionnaire survey distributed through Facebook fitness communities. The conceptual model posits that structural empowerment—comprising interactivity, fitness service attractiveness, and image congruence—and social empowerment (relationship benefits) enhance psychological empowerment, measured through self-efficacy, meaning, impact, and autonomy. These, in turn, drive continuance intention and willingness to pay. Hypotheses were tested using SmartPLS 4.0 with 5,000 bootstrap iterations. Results reveal that interactivity (β = 0.319, p < 0.001), fitness service attractiveness (β = 0.271, p < 0.01), and image congruence (β = 0.206, p < 0.001) significantly boost psychological empowerment, explaining 54.4% of its variance. Conversely, relationship benefits (β = 0.045, p = 0.553) showed no significant effect, suggesting social interactions are less critical than core platform features. Psychological empowerment strongly predicts continuance intention (β = 0.742, p < 0.001) and willingness to pay (β = 0.552, p < 0.001), accounting for 55.0% and 30.4% of their variances, respectively. Among sub-dimensions, meaning (0.891) and autonomy (0.856) were most influential, highlighting the importance of perceived fitness significance and control. For academic scholars, this study extends customer empowerment literature by applying it to online fitness services, a context underexplored compared to branding or online communities. It underscores structural empowerment’s dominance over social factors in technology-driven settings, enriching O2O and service innovation discourse. For practitioners, findings suggest providers prioritize interactivity (e.g., AI-driven feedback), appealing content, and self-image alignment to foster loyalty. This study illuminates how empowerment sustains online fitness engagement, offering strategic insights for providers navigating a competitive digital market.
Keywords: Customer empowerment, Value co-creation, Service innovation, Online fitness service, Platform eco-system