The 'health hub economy' - where effort becomes identity, community and commerce...
Starting with Strava, and widening to food, pets, kit, medical, travel and audiobooks, we'll consider how the health ecosystem is a cross-sector, supra-category "customer context" for CustomerX
Customers do not live in ‘sectors’. In a recent post, I talked about the “compressed economy” of airports, as the sector-blend luxury, travel, retail, restaurants, lounges, wellness and financial services into one context, without breaking a sweat. Next up in the health/sports data world, showing how an app like Strava has become a key player in how customers exercise, play, date, get healthcare, buy insurance, get retail therapy, game and even betray troop locations to enemy scrutiny1 ;) The “health hub” is the second customer context that illustrates the post-sector, channel-blind world we draw at CustomerX.
Strava
If it’s not on Strava, did it really happen? Strava is the app that takes your exercise data (GPS tracking, heart rate and sport-specific measurements like cadence, power output, etc) and then publishes, tracks and analyses your exercise. It adds a friendship and social graph and supports data exchange, rewards, and commerce.
It’s where effort becomes identity
Initially, recording bike rides (from sensor to my Garmin account and then uploading to Strava - pain!) elicited no more than an eye-roll from my wife. Now, with its web of technical, commercial and social connections, Strava gives us a central player in the “activity-as-cross-sector-customer-context”, so let’s look at the connections from here.
Strava’s expansion vectors as a platform for gamefication, social and commerce
Vector 1: Gamification - roads as racecourses
Firstly, Strava ‘gamifies the road’. In road cycling, the term “King of the Mountain” refers to the best climber in a major race, like the Tour de France. Climbs are classified (by length, incline and severity) from a ‘category 4’ (the closest these athletes get to ‘easy’) to Hors Category (‘beyond categorisation’ - think of a vertical brick wall lasting 30kms). The winner wears the coveted polka dot jersey.
Strava takes that terminology and applies it to any road or “segment” - whoever’s fastest along that stretch gets “KOM” against their time, shown on a league table for that segment.
Public infrastructure becomes a competitive layer
There is also humour and fun to be had in the clever creation and naming of segments.
Completionist drive
Building from this concept (of repeating the same segment for the highest speed) is its total opposite: Wandrer.earth. Wandrer takes data from Strava (which in turn may have reached it from Garmin or other tracking sources) and gives you points for each new, fresh kilometre you cover. Its creator, Craig Durkin, coded this as a way to encourage exploration, and this is now a part of my life - seeking “fresh Ks” wherever I travel. The same mechanism, different approach, complementary fun. It adds “completionist logic” to the game.
[A sports]Man’s best friend 🐕
Strava also supports your pet’s activities. Really.
Fi Tracking is a connected collar for your dog that measures its activity. Strava now allows you to upload your pet’s paces alongside your own2.
Now, dogs have leaderboards by breed (visible in the Fi app), but this growth of tracking has riled the purists who feel that their sports-first app is being diluted and distracted by the poochy capers, yoga sessions and volleyball activities3. IMO, this is part of the move towards a generic platform rather than a niche community tool, so provided there are filters, I’m happy to see other activities by my friends and Strava buddies.
When the collar gets a KOM you know the system’s transcended its initial purpose!
Brands and retailers join the game
Sports brands show affinity, genuine community connection and commercial links via Strava, crossing sectors to retail.
First off, props to the OG cycling brands like Rapha.cc and LeCol. Rapha’s Club is an approach that brings the stores (oops, “clubhouses” with cafes), rides from the stores, organised group rides and self-identifying rides together. Remember, Rapha is the brand that offers you a discount on a replacement kit bought due to weight loss from cycling, or damage from taking a spill off your bike. Proper commitment, and I dream of needing to size down!
Rapha organises “Festive 500s” (where you record 500km+ over the Christmas break) and LeCol routinely offers product discounts and rewards for completing activities.
Nike Run Club, Adidas Running, and many others support, celebrate and promote activity. This extends to running tips, gear advice (of course!) and athlete stories.
Strava is the place both to fish for new customers and to “show up and be with your customer” as the sweat, pound, strive and achieve.
Strava, in turn, has a neat capability to record what you’re using on a given bout of exercise. I note which bike I was using, the shoes, and other bits of kit. This is both fun (I know, I’m sad) and interesting, and of course a buy signal (“you’ve worn these trainers for 4,000Km - time to get a new pair”).
For brands, this information is a goldmine, but also allows you to spend time with your best customers when they’re not in your store!
The relationship used to start and end at the till. Now it runs with them.
Vector 2: Crossing sectors - follow the behaviour
Beyond the obvious kit companies and sports-focused commercial activity, we’re seeing some cross-category tie-ups…
Audible x Strava
If you join the Audible challenge - 6hr 5m of activity (cunningly, the average audiobook length, it seems) - you get 2 months of Audible free. Great - I’m already an Audible subscriber, so I get zero benefit. I still signed up. Why? No idea.
The programme had a re-up in February 2026 and now offers free Strava Premium4. Again, I signed up. Again, I won nothing since I’m already a Strava Premium member. Honestly!
What’s interesting about the tie-up is that Audible’s own research showed that 80% of Australian runners find audiobooks ‘beneficial’ during runs. “People who listen” also exercise 25% more often and for 35% longer… So, the tie-up makes sense5.
Not all listening is the spoken word. Spotify integrated directly into Strava’s activity-recording screen back in 2023, and you can now play, pause and skip without leaving the Strava app. All that we need is for the playlist BPM to be controllable by the crown on the Apple Watch, and we’ll be laughing. Apple, call me 🤙
The cross-sector behaviour is only curious until you realise that it’s following the customer’s behaviour/
Audible and Strava seemed odd until you remembered that runners have two free hands and two open ears.
Westin Hotels, Airbnb x Strava
240+ Westin properties globally have curated running routes starting from the hotel front door, as part of the WestinWORKOUT programme6. You can earn Marriott Bonvoy points for completing the RunWESTIN Challenge.7 AirBnB has also joined in with running advice near properties under the marketing slogan of going on a “run-cation”. Strava data shows that people run 14% further and hike 32% more when staying in hotels, so yet again the tie-up follows the behaviour.
Jet2 x Strava
“Cycle to Sunshine”. OK, thank you. This was in my Strava feed today… I’m ticking off the hotels, now the airlines.
Hardware providers join the ecosystem
I’ve mentioned the clothing/footwear brands above, but Cycling and other sports have a large element of electronics and metalwork. In the case of cycling, we have computerised GPS navigation, linked to heart rate and cadence, and the “gubbins” on your bike (pedals, gears, chainsets, levers - the “groupset”) are chunky one-off purchases that the vendors wish you’d upgrade.
Enter the hardware manufacturers into the ecosystem.
SRAM makes groupsets (a major competitor to Shimano and Campagnolo), and some years ago, it acquired an independent cycling computer company, Hammerhead (purveyors of the Karoo 2 computer). So a chain-and-gears company acquired a screen and software business. If you are remotely interested, then the wonderful “DC Rainmaker” has a lengthy analysis. One for the committed - it’s a deep but enlightening rabbit hole! 🐰🕳️
Wahoo (creators of the tricked-out indoor bike trainers) created SYSTM - their training software package - to move beyond hardware.
Vector 3: Third space and dating 🥰
Let’s move beyond Strava for a moment and into the world of health and wellness. In this world, where actual exercise and activity take place, we see changes in the customer’s contexts, too.
Last century, a gym’s smell (baked hormones and socks) would hit you before you’d even checked in, and the aesthetic was Rocky on a bad day. Skip forward to today, and we see city-centre gyms adopt the aesthetic of a luxury spa, with high-tech machines, wellness offerings and juice, kombucha and laser treatments all round. They are “clubs” more than gyms.
In 2024, The Gym Group surveyed 2000 UK 18- 24-year-olds and found that8:
37% of GenZ view working out as a way to socialise (rising to 44% in 2025)
42% (51% by 2025) have formed new friendships while keeping fit.
The average monthly spend on fitness per the survey was £48.81 - more than streaming, eating out, and fashion.
Anecdotally, Gen Z finds the gym a better place to meet prospective partners (as disillusionment with dating apps rises).
Gen Z explicitly call their gyms a “third space” (I’ll do a piece solely on this in the future, but the echoes to the airport experiences are clear).
Dwell time is inventory in the third space, and Strava is a data layer
Vector 4: To medical data and insurance
So far, we’ve covered commercially obvious connections - retailers and D2C businesses following their customers. However, Strava is part of a vertical, “internal” market of medical data.
Apple Health is an ecosystem of sensors, apps, and data, all linked to one’s Apple ID.
Apple Health’s “Share with Provider” (iOS 15+) is a live sync of wearable data, ECG readings, sleep apnea data, and clinical records into participating hospitals’ EHR (electronic health records) systems. It’s seamless and just works.
Strava, of course, links into this. It tells Apple what my exercise was, while Apple tells it my sleep, weight and so on.
Then my Withings digital scales measure my water content, bone density, lean mass, fat, visceral fat and - I think - my weight ;) Via Apple Health, it knows my steps, and Strava also sees the data.
Ecosystem. Everything’s connected.
Before typing this, I scrolled through the settings of Apple Health and saw mental health records, ECG, AFib history, health assessments, menstrual cycles… all available to share with a health professional at the click of a button. For my last medical, when I was asked about my exercises, general health, weight, etc., I simply got the report from my phone - I think my heart skipped with joy as I shared it. Must check the records ;)
This connectivity affects the electronic and medical products sectors too - no self-respecting device wants to be unconnected. The value is in the aggregate.
Wearables
Beyond the strapped-on Apple Watch or an Oura ring, wearables extend the universe of connected body data. Diabetics know the value of the body-attached continuous glucose monitors, and we’re seeing other “things” attached to our bodies that undertake monitoring. From the recently announced perimenopause tracker, Peri, to the new generations of smart glasses that, in addition to tracking people back to their LinkedIn photos (allegedly!), monitor eye movements to detect brain anomalies. The research team at EssilorLuxotica are busy looking to bring monitoring to smart glasses - handy since they own both RayBan and Oakley, so have active partnerships with Meta.
Insurance
With all of this data, it’s no surprise that the health insurance companies are interested. Direct data access enables innovations in business models.
VitalityLife UK (owned by South Africa-based Discovery, formerly marketed as PruProtect) offers a discount for “healthy behaviour”.
Recent online ads are offering new policy-holders a free Apple Watch - all the better to track you, my dear!
The actuarial reasons are obvious, and a great boon to the healthy and wealthy. For the economically less well-heeled, then it’s a gulf in provision that is set to widen.
Insurers don’t care what sport you do. They just care the you keep doing it - and that they can see you doing it.
New Customer Contexts
We started with Strava (other apps are available) as a modern hub for exercise data and communities of interest. Then retail and entertainment joined the party. Hardware (electronic and sporting) got involved, then travel links, leisure spaces (“third spaces”), medical data and insurance soon followed. Let’s not forget our dogs!
Together we see a new customer context: a set of situations, places, mental availability and influences that are beyond one sector, one brand or one modality.
This is not a “fitness” story, but rather a ‘customer-context’ story. Unlike the airport (where we have compressed commerce over a couple of hours), this context can run your whole healthy and active life.
At CustomerX, we’ll be looking at this context (and how the sector leaders can copy, collaborate or compete to extract as much as possible of the customer’s disposable income and discretionary spend). In future newsletters, I’ll pick up on other contexts. In the meantime, please share your thoughts, and especially any further connections I may have missed or skipped over.
Endmatter
What are your experiences of the health-data-activity-social ecosystem? Do share.
CustomerX takes place in London at Olympia International Conference Centre on 14–15 October 2026. I am looking for speakers, case studies and change-making idea-generators, so do get in touch.
You may also enjoy the previous piece, which argues that AI’s adoption dissolves sectors and accelerates change, and the piece on the airport compresses commerce.
AI: solvent and accelerant on the route to a CustomerX world
For decades, commerce has been organised around sectors: retail, travel, media, leisure, finance, health. The origin of these sectors was simply that the products and services were constructed, produced and delivered differently: fresh produce to a store (Grocer), versus renting of clean and tidy rooms (hotels) or operating a current account such that c…
Coming next in the series:
The sofa — the new Friday night
Belonging — hotels, gyms, travel, cinemas, retailers, restaurants and brands in the membership economy
Peace of mind — insurance, pensions, savings and investments, where hope itself becomes sellable
Giving away the location of secret bases (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases) and a wonderful tracemap of a run aboard a French aircraft carrier (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd9vdel17wqo). Other armies and locations are available.
Source: https://press.strava.com/articles/strava-and-fi-partner-to-launch-a-first-of-its-kind-integration-for-national
Scroll for the grumpy comments kicking in, after a couple of pages of dog photos… https://communityhub.strava.com/insider-journal-9/strava-s-new-integration-with-the-fi-smart-dog-collar-1522
https://www.strava.com/challenges/Move-with-Audible
https://www.mediaweek.com.au/audible-australia-research-audiobooks-mornings/
https://stories.strava.com/articles/be-a-traveler-and-a-runner-with-westin-hotels-7-scenic-routes
https://apacinsider.digital/westin-hotels-and-strava-collaborate-for-global-running-day/
https://www.tggplc.com/news-and-media/press-releases/fitness-and-friendship-combine-for-gen-z-as-more-than-a-third-view-working-out-as-a-way-to-socialise/ and https://www.thegymgroup.com/blog/gen-z-fitness-pulse-report-key-findings/
Very interesting example, and definitely a great point to start understanding the scope and relevance of CustomerX!