Why Excitement Is the Wrong Emotion for Your Gym Marketing

In 2024, researchers at the University of Sydney spent A$383 on a Google ad for the mental health charity Beyond Blue. The ad ran for one week and generated A$7,250 in donations, a return of 1,891% on ad spend. This demonstrates the power of inspirational gym marketing to create impressive results through targeted campaigns.

They ran a second ad for the same charity, with the same budget, the same search terms, and the same donation page structure. That one returned negative 32%.

Both ads sold the same cause to the same audience for roughly the same money. The first was built around inspiration, and the second around information, and the gap between those two emotional strategies was roughly A$7,120 from people making real decisions about whether a cause was worth their wallet.

The researchers wanted to know which positive emotions actually drive the outcomes marketers care about: sharing, recommendation, and willingness to pay. They tested ten of them head-to-head. Excitement, the emotion the fitness industry has built its entire creative language around, came fifth.

A 2026 study in the European Journal of Marketing tested ten positive emotions across three studies and found that inspiration consistently outperformed excitement, determination, enthusiasm, and interest in driving ad sharing, brand recommendation, and willingness to pay more. In a field experiment, an inspirational ad campaign returned 1,891% ROI compared to negative 32% for an informational campaign. Gym marketing that defaults to high-energy, excitement-based messaging is optimising for the fifth most valuable emotion when the first is available.

What a Charity Campaign Has to Do With Your Gym Ads

Jung and Mitchell, working out of the University of Sydney Business School, published the research in the European Journal of Marketing in 2026. They ran three studies. The first asked 300 people to rate ten positive emotions across eight value dimensions: how much pleasure each emotion brought, how motivated it made them, how far it broadened their thinking, and what they would pay to experience it. The ten emotions came from the PANAS scale, a validated framework used across psychological research: active, alert, attentive, determined, enthusiastic, excited, inspired, interested, proud, and strong.

Inspired was the only emotion that ranked in the top five across all eight dimensions. Consumers said they would pay $53 to experience inspiration, compared to $49 for excitement, $38 for being active, and $38 for feeling alert. The gap between the most and least valued emotions was $15, which is a meaningful spread when the entire range sits between $38 and $53.

The second study used real YouTube ads from Expedia. Participants were randomly assigned to watch either an inspirational emotional ad or an informational ad featuring science communicator Bill Nye explaining the mechanics of air travel, and both were roughly three minutes long. The researchers then measured ad sharing intention, brand recommendation, and willingness to pay more.

Participants who watched the inspirational ad were significantly more likely to share it (4.85 vs 3.50 on a seven-point scale), recommend the brand (5.21 vs 3.93), and pay more for the service (4.30 vs 3.19). The effect sizes were moderate to large, and the researchers went further by running parallel mediation analyses that compared the indirect effects of each positive emotion on these outcomes. Inspiration was the strongest mediator in every model, consistently outperforming excitement, determination, enthusiasm, and interest. The other emotions contributed, but inspiration carried most of the explanatory weight.

The third study tracked real money. The researchers created two Google AdWords campaigns for Beyond Blue, one informational and one inspirational, and ran them for one week with nearly identical budgets (A$383 vs A$407). The inspirational campaign generated 13 donations totalling A$7,250, a return of 1,891% on ad spend, while the informational campaign generated 4 donations totalling A$130 for a return of negative 32%.

The informational campaign actually had a higher click-through rate, which means more people clicked on the factual ad. But once visitors landed on the inspirational page, they were nearly three times more likely to donate. The click brought people through the door, and the emotion on the landing page determined what they did once they were inside.

Inspiration (in a marketing context) A positive emotion characterised by transcendence and approach motivation. Where excitement is high-energy and diffuse, inspiration involves the awareness of new possibilities that go beyond a person’s current assumptions, combined with the motivation to act on them. Inspiration is a higher-order emotion, requiring some degree of cognitive processing about what the person is inspired by, rather than being a reflexive state like feeling alert or energised. See also: Cognitive Bias Library

Why Inspiration Outperforms the Emotions Gyms Default To

The fitness industry has always conflated activation with persuasion, operating on the assumption that getting someone’s heart rate up emotionally, through fast cuts and aggressive music and urgent language, is the marketing work. The research suggests activation is a byproduct. People who felt excited after watching an ad were more positive than those who felt nothing, but when you put excitement and inspiration into the same statistical model, inspiration explains more of the variance in every outcome measured.

The researchers connected this to Fredrickson’s Broaden and Build Theory, which proposes that positive emotions do different things depending on their nature. Some narrow attention and increase arousal, while others broaden thinking and build lasting personal resources like knowledge, resilience, and social connection. Excitement is largely an arousal emotion that spikes and dissipates. Inspiration operates through transcendence, the sense that something larger than your current situation is possible, combined with the motivation to act on that possibility, and that combination of broadened thinking and approach motivation is what makes it persist.

Inspiration is also relatively scarce. People experience it less frequently than emotions like attentiveness, interest, or alertness, and scarcity may increase its perceived value. An emotion you feel every day carries less weight than one that arrives occasionally and reshapes how you see what is possible. Consumers in this study were willing to pay more to experience inspiration than any other positive emotion tested, which is consistent with its rarity.

Emotional Value Appraisal A framework developed by Jung and Mitchell (2026) for evaluating positive emotions across multiple value dimensions, including hedonic pleasure, motivational power, ability to broaden thinking, capacity to build personal resources, scarcity, shareability, overall value, and dollar value. The framework draws on Broaden and Build Theory and consumer value theory to propose that emotions are not interchangeable in their marketing effects.

What This Means for the Content Sitting on Your Gym’s Feed

The standard gym social post operates in one emotional register: excitement adjacent. GET AFTER IT. NEW YEAR NEW YOU. SWEAT IS FAT CRYING. This register is so consistent across the industry that it has become invisible, and no one questions it because no one has tested it against the alternative.

The alternative, according to this research, is content that makes someone feel like something beyond their current situation is available to them. That feeling is qualitatively different from the adrenaline spike of a motivational montage, because it does not require exclamation marks or capital letters. What it requires is a story, an example, or an observation that opens up a possibility the viewer had not considered before.

The researchers noted that inspiration has a transmission function, meaning people who feel inspired tend to pass it on rather than simply acting on it themselves. The study found that inspirational content is shared more diversely, using more varied language, than non-inspirational content. In a digital marketing context where organic reach depends on people sharing your content through their own networks, the transmission quality of the emotion matters as much as its intensity.

The Expedia ad that outperformed the informational version was a three-minute video about children in a research hospital being taken on virtual trips. The emotion came from a quiet, human story about possibility in a constrained situation, while the informational ad featured a well-known science communicator explaining the mechanics of booking flights. More people clicked on the informational ad, and fewer of them did anything once they arrived.

Inspiration also increased willingness to pay more for the same service. If inspiration creates perceived value in a way that excitement does not, gyms relying on excitement-based marketing may be inadvertently training their audience to treat the product as a commodity, something that needs to get the blood pumping at point of sale rather than something worth paying a premium for. The choice architecture research on how your membership page frames decisions applies here too: the emotional frame your content sets determines what the prospect evaluates first.

The Nuance

The researchers acknowledge that real-world ads rarely isolate a single emotion. The inspirational Expedia ad also evoked determination, interest, and enthusiasm alongside inspiration, and you cannot run a campaign on pure, distilled inspiration any more than you can serve a meal made entirely of salt. The finding is about which emotion leads, not which emotion exists alone. Campaigns designed with inspiration at the front outperformed those that led with other emotions, even though the supporting cast was always present.

Previous research by Tellis and colleagues found that emotional ads are shared more on general platforms like Facebook and Google, while informational ads perform relatively better on LinkedIn. The researchers noted this and suggested that inspiration may be more effective in contexts where emotional contagion operates freely, which covers most social media platforms but possibly not all professional channels.

The field experiment, while striking in its ROI figures, ran on a small sample of thirteen donations versus four, across a single week. The authors themselves note that the brevity of a Google ad may have reduced the inspirational strength of the stimulus, and longer campaigns with multiple executions would likely produce stronger effects, but the magnitude of the difference in this short window is still difficult to dismiss.

Research Summary

Study	Context	Finding
Jung & Mitchell, 2026 (Study 1)	300 consumers rating 10 positive emotions on 8 value dimensions	Inspiration ranked in top 5 across all dimensions. Consumers would pay $53 to experience it, more than any other emotion tested.
Jung & Mitchell, 2026 (Study 2)	Online experiment comparing inspirational vs informational Expedia ads (n=296)	Inspiration was the strongest emotional driver of ad sharing, brand recommendation, and willingness to pay more.
Jung & Mitchell, 2026 (Study 3)	Field experiment with Google AdWords for Beyond Blue charity	Inspirational campaign: 1,891% ROI (A$7,250 from A$383). Informational: -32% ROI (A$130 from A$407).

The Question

If excitement is the fifth most valuable emotion for driving the outcomes your gym depends on, and inspiration is the first, what would your marketing look like if you stopped trying to pump people up and started trying to open something up?

People Also Ask

Does inspirational gym marketing work better than motivational content?

Research from the European Journal of Marketing found that inspiration outperformed excitement, determination, enthusiasm, and interest as a driver of ad sharing, brand recommendation, and willingness to pay more. Motivational content that relies on arousal and urgency produces short-term engagement but weaker long-term outcomes compared to content that evokes a sense of expanded possibility.

What emotions drive gym member referrals?

A 2026 study by Jung and Mitchell found that inspiration was the strongest emotional predictor of brand recommendation across all emotions tested. The transmission function of inspiration means people who feel inspired are more likely to pass the content on, using more varied and personal language, than people experiencing excitement or enthusiasm.

How can gyms use inspiration in their advertising?

The research suggests that inspiration comes from stories of transcendence, where someone’s situation changes or where a new possibility becomes visible. The most effective inspirational ad in the study was a quiet, human story about possibility, not a high-energy montage. Gyms could focus on member stories that show transformation in terms of what became possible, rather than what was endured.

Your entire Instagram feed is trying to get people excited. The research says that is the fifth best thing you could be doing.

References

Jung, K. & Mitchell, V. (2026). Inspirational advertising: emotional value and marketing benefits. European Journal of Marketing, 60(13), 391-421. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-11-2023-0853

Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). Positive emotions broaden and build. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 1-53.

Tellis, G. J., MacInnis, D. J., Tirunillai, S. & Zhang, Y. (2019). What drives virality (sharing) of online digital content? The critical role of information, emotion, and brand prominence. Journal of Marketing, 83(4), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242919841034

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