Our Market Research – what we found.

You might remember that a little while back, we asked you to help us out with some market research that we commissioned in support of our impending planning application to North Tyneside Council.

Well, the results are in. So… do you wanna know what we discovered?

We’ll take that as a yes. ;o)

Our market research company has been working with a pretty comprehensive data set that includes 571 on-street interviews that provide a representative sample of the general population, and 1299 online responses that represent our social media followers.

One of the big takeaways for us was discovering that 61% of the people we talked to on the street were aware of our plans to bring the pool back to life. That’s extraordinarily high for this kind of project, and it’s mostly down to you spreading the word – so keep going, keep sharing, keep telling people… it’s incredibly important!

Now for some other headline facts and figures…

A strong majority of people (77% on street / 67% online) said “fitness was important to their everyday life”. We learned that once our plans were described in a bit more detail, they received overwhelming support (97% on street / 95% online). And lastly, after hearing about our plans, a significant majority of people said they would visit at least once (79% on street / 94% online) with almost as many saying they would visit several times per year (65% on street / 82% online).

We’ll be publishing full details of the research together with our analysis soon, but for now it all confirms, in our minds at least, that the work we’ve been doing over the last few years to get the project to this point has been the right thing to do. People want this pool!

One other thing we found was that a majority of people are MORE likely to visit a heated outdoor pool than an indoor one (59% on street / 84% online).

That might sound like a no-brainer, but it’s why we’ve planned to heat this new pool from DAY ONE. In fact, one of the most frequent comments we hear is that the old pool was… how can we put it… *bleep*ing freezing!

So, for anyone who missed this part, the new pool WILL be heated. We repeat, the new pool WILL be heated.

So there you have it – this market research means we’ve jumped another hurdle, and taken another step towards gaining valuable planning consent. There are still a few more i’s to dot and t’s to cross before we get there, but rest assured, we’re still doing everything we can to make it happen.

In the meantime, we’re working on updating all the info we have available about the project which will make it easier for everyone to stay up to date with progress. Look out for an announcement about this shortly.

Oh, and before we go, there‘s one more thing we need to announce for our market research survey – the winner of our £50 Amazon voucher. We can tell you that the lucky respondent was Helen Richardson – well done Helen!