Fitness First is Berlin's biggest chain of gyms and it was looking to attract new members on a very low budget. People tend to go to the gym to burn off excess calories. So Fitness First decided to target people where they are consuming those excess calories - in restaurants.
Fitness First teamed up with restaurants which were in the vicinity of the gyms and reprogrammed their cash registers. This meant that when diners received their receipts they not only saw the price of the food they had eaten, but also the number of calories contained within that food and the number of hours it would take to work off those calories in the gym. At the bottom of the receipt a message would read: "Your meal had a total calorie value of 2,100. Don't worry, it takes just 3 hours of exercise to burn them!" This was accompanied by some Fitness First branding and an explanation that the receipt serves as a voucher for a free training session at the local gym branch.
Within the first month, more than 300 people traded their voucher for a training session and more than 30% of them then became Fitness First members.