India’s fitness market is at an interesting point. Gyms are no longer trying to convince consumers that fitness matters, that job is already done. But, the number of people who actually pay for organised fitness remains remarkably small. Deloitte India and the Health & Fitness Association’s 2025 report puts fitness facility membership penetration at just 0.8% of the population, with the industry expected to grow from ₹16,200 crore in 2024 to ₹37,700 crore by 2030.
This gap between awareness and participation is the central battleground for fitness brands. The category, in the past few years, has also become more fragmented. Boutique studios offering Pilates, HIIT, yoga and MMA are among the fastest-growing formats, while newer communities built around functional training, running and HYROX are giving consumers more specialised ways to exercise.
For Anytime Fitness India, a global 24/7 gym franchise, the rise of new formats does not necessarily signal the decline of the traditional gym. Instead, the brand sees an opportunity to broaden what a gym represents. Ryan Rocque, Marketing Head, Anytime Fitness India, finds the more significant change in what consumers now expect from a membership. “Our strategy has shifted from pushing price points and offers into a more strategic, experience-driven approach where we talk more about health, wellness, longevity and lifestyle,” Rocque explains.
He also credits the government’s growing focus on sports and wellness with helping the category reach new audiences and build awareness. But for Anytime Fitness, the newer focus is on integrating fitness into consumers’ existing lifestyles and making it part of their long-term journey.
To achieve their objectives, the brand currently puts around 80% of its marketing into digital. But being a new-age brand, traditional is not completely out of the way, the remaining 20% of their marketing budgets go towards outdoor, PR and magazines. Digital gives the brand the ability to track leads and conversions and optimise campaigns, but its marketing does not stop at measurable acquisition. Their local influencer strategy, for instance, is built around the geography of the gym itself. The brand works with fitness, lifestyle and food creators, particularly micro and nano influencers, whose audiences overlap with the catchment areas of individual gyms. With members typically coming from within roughly a five-kilometre radius, the relevance of a creator’s local audience matters as much as their overall following. The hyperlocal approach is supported by a more personal form of communication as well, the member story. Rocque mentions that campaigns built around real members have generated 2X higher engagement.
When acquisition is only half the job
The category’s challenge, however, is not limited to getting someone to sign up, it is to getting them to keep coming. Anytime Fitness found that around 42% of memberships were linked to people who eventually stopped coming to the gym regularly.
But rather than stopping at treating that purely as a retention metric, the brand turned the behaviour into a creative opportunity. In Delhi, it used outdoor billboards to call out members who had stopped showing up. Boards saying, “This billboard was paid for by using Rahul's membership. And Rahul, if you're reading this, please come back to the gym,” were put up. The campaign generated PR coverage, social sharing and organic traction.
The point, Rocque adds, was not to prove that outdoor advertising works better than digital. It is aimed at solving a problem. “We don't go in with the mindset of ‘I want to do a billboard’. We start with ‘I want to do something. How can I reach my members and which channel would fit into that?’” he says.
Consumers occupy the centre of all their strategies, specifies Rocque. Through their CRM and community efforts, members can monitor their attendance through the app or automated triggers can reach out when their frequency begins to decline. Inside the gyms, the brand is also trying to create smaller communities through challenges and interactions between members.
The objective is to make consistency less about willpower and more about belonging. “The gym has to fit into your life, not that you're supposed to build your life around the gym,” Rocque elaborates.
Referring to the growth of fitness boutiques, Rocque argues that specialised formats can sit alongside a conventional gym membership because the latter provides the foundation of strength, endurance and cardio needed for many of these activities. The response will therefore not to replicate every emerging format, but to strengthen the role of the gym as a broader fitness and community hub.
Taking the model beyond the North
Anytime Fitness has around 100 gyms in North India, giving the brand a relatively strong hold of the region. Consequently, its marketing there is more conversion-oriented. Whereas in markets such as Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, the focus is establishing the brand and building its premium positioning. For that, the brand is looking at partnerships, events and experiences that put it in front of potential members in relevant environments.
When it is about Tier-II markets, the concern moves beyond whether consumers will pay a premium to whether the brand can demonstrate the value behind that premium. Local influencers, activations and community-building initiatives form part of that effort. Franchisees receive a national marketing calendar and overarching brand direction, while retaining room to introduce local content, challenges and language. Beyond the metros, this is particularly relevant. Deloitte notes that the top 10 cities account for 56% of India’s fitness-market revenue but only 31% of fitness facilities, pointing to an uneven distribution of supply and a substantial opportunity outside the largest markets.
The expansion plan
Anytime Fitness began the previous year with around 130 gyms in India and is now approaching its 200th gym, putting it on a trajectory towards 500 gyms by 2030. The campaigns planned around the 200th gym will centre on members and their experiences, positioning the new location as the outcome of the community that has been built across the network.
That is consistent with the broader direction of the brand: expansion may bring the scale, but the marketing challenge is to create reasons for people to enter, engage and remain. But for Rocque, one of the biggest challenges as the brand grows is not only identifying the next customer, but demonstrating that marketing investment is producing an impact and giving campaigns enough time to do so. He argues that marketers can sometimes abandon campaigns too quickly when immediate results do not materialise. For a fitness brand, where consumer decisions and habits naturally take time to change, the relationship between marketing and business results may not always be immediate. It also cannot sit with marketing alone. The promise made in a campaign has to be delivered by operations, while the sales team has to convert the resulting interest into memberships.
With paid fitness penetration still below 1%, the opportunity for growth is extending well beyond any single format or operator. The competition will capture a place in consumers’ routines, whether through a traditional gym, a boutique studio, a digital platform or a combination of all three.
The path to growth for Anytime Fitness is, therefore, a strategy built around scale, community, data, convenience and local relevance. As the brand moves towards 500 gyms, its ambition is not simply to expand its footprint, “Growth for us would mean better facilities and a fitter India. What matters most is building a community of individuals who are focused on themselves and creating something in this space that can become the biggest and best fitness brand in India,” Rocque concludes.
