Why It Works: How Gymshark employs behavioural science to form a habit

Are you one of the many thousands of us planning a return to the gym this month? If so, you might well find yourself shopping for a bit of new kit motivation. And there’s every chance you’ll turn to Gymshark.

Because this brand is everywhere. Since Ben Francis launched it in 2012, the company’s net worth has soared to an estimated £1.5bn.

Why? To a large extent their popularity has been driven by influencer marketing, particularly on TikTok. And one of the most successful strategies across social media has been its 66 Day Challenge. This encourages users to sign up to an app that tracks daily goals, with the aim of reaching 66 consecutive days.

The results of the #gymshark66 campaign have been impressive — more than 1.9 million likes, 12,576 comments, and 45.5 million views, as of May 2024. And it’s still growing.

Habit at the heart

At the core of Gymshark’s 66 Day Challenge is some solid evidence from behavioural science about how to build new habits.

In 2009, Phillippa Lally, working in health psychology at University College London, set out to investigate how long it takes for a behaviour to become a habit. She asked participants to select a behaviour that they wanted to turn into a daily habit (e.g. healthy eating, meditation etc.). Here are some examples:

Category	Habit
Eating	●     Eating a piece of fruit with lunch ●     Eating a piece of fruit while watching TV in the evening
Drinking	●     Drinking a glass of water after breakfast
Exercise	●     Doing 50 sit-ups after a morning coffee ●     Walking for 10 minutes after breakfast ●     Doing 15 minutes exercise before dinner
Other	●     Daily meditation

Each day, participants recorded whether or not they’d performed the action and how automatic the behaviour felt.

Lally found that it took an average of — guess what? — 66 consecutive days for the action to feel automatic. It’s important to note that this was an average, and masks considerable variation according to the individual. For some, it took just 18 days for a behaviour to feel embedded. For others, as long as 254 days.

As you might expect that sense of automaticity was achieved more quickly for simple actions, like drinking a glass of water after breakfast, than for more effortful actions, such as 50 sit-ups.

It seems like Gymshark was inspired by Lally’s study. But there are other experiments with results in the same ballpark if you’re looking to build behaviours that feel automatic.

For example, in 2015, Navin Kaushal and Ryan Rhodes at the University of Victoria in Canada investigated the consistency required for gym behaviours to become habitual. They enrolled 111 people who had become gym members within the past two weeks.

Over 12 weeks, participants were asked to record their exercise habits i.e. how often and for how long they spent on different types of exercise (mild, moderate and strenuous). They also indicated whether the exercise felt like an automatic habit.

The study found that exercising at least four times a week for a minimum of 6 weeks was needed to establish an exercise habit. This equates to 24 sessions but requires the action to be repeated over the course of at least 42 days to become ingrained.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers found that keeping things easy, being comfortable with the workout environment, and whether people felt positive after their workout, all made it more likely that a habit would be formed.

Why It Works: How Marmite took a weakness and turned it into a strengthThese findings are a good fit with Gymshark’s challenge, which encourages you to pick simple habits to work on. The original challenge also offered a year’s free supply of Gymshark goods as an incentive for those with the best results. And there are rewards in praise when you share your results and sit back as the likes flood in.

If you’re trying to build a new customer habit this year, there are two important implications from these studies.

First, real habits don’t develop overnight. If you want meaningful change, don’t budget for a short burst. Instead think of habit creation as something that needs longer term, sustained support. Whether it’s 6 weeks or 66 days, it’ll be the campaigns that consistently nurture new behaviours that have the greatest chance of success.

Second, while we know habits required sustained support, the exact amount of time needed varies. It’s partly dependent on the aptitude of the audience and partly the scale of the task. So don’t feel beholden to 66 days. Instead use it as a rough guide and adapt according to your own circumstances.

If you apply these principles, hopefully you’ll have as much success as Gymshark.

Richard Shotton is founder of the consultancy Astroten. His new book The Illusion of Choice, about applying behavioural science to marketing is now available. He tweets at @rshotton.