What are the Challenges for the Makers of the Cardiocore Machine Ball Bike in Making it a Big Seller

I wrote recently about the difficulty level of Ball Bike for beginners. One of the hardest markets to deliver a winning fitness product to is people who haven’t worked out much in the near recent past or who have almost no meaningful history of working out at all.

While they are big purchasers, they are often big returners of programs and equipment. The reason is often that they are either not seeing results like they hoped quick enough or the workout is just too hard.

In the context of Ball Bike, two concerns are very evident upon initial look. First, it is a very hard machine that creates a very demanding core cardio workout. If you aren’t in some level of shape, you might just not keep at it until you do improve. This was a big obstacle for the people marketing P90X

Second, the newness of Ball Bike means there isn’t customer peer support. In the case of P90X there is the important factor of the beachbody support network on the beachbody.com website. People can immediately connect with the thousands of people in their current state of progress.

This allows for the sharing of tips, encouragement, and war stories that give the person a sense of community and can inspire to fight on through the pain and discomfort. 

With Ball Bike, there aren’t many current owners and there isn’t anything even close to that level of community. This is definitely a large obstacle for Ball Bike to overcome in gaining a foothold.

Beyond the always vexing beginner issues, Ball Bike has a couple interesting but not unbeatable issues to carve out a share in the market for people who are already active in fitness.

One problem is that P90X is such a hard act to beat.  Whenever you have a product that got that level of consistent excellent word of mouth, you are essentially a fad taking on something that is established and reliable.

What Ball Bike is likely to do is anyone’s guess, but here goes: look for them to market themselves as requiring less daily time commitment than the roughly 1 hour P90X.

The other exploitable area vs. home workouts like P90X is the difficulty of these programs. Equipment marketing is about the machine helping you make the difficult easier without any displacing of great results.

Because the price points on equipment are almost always high, the determination will largely rest on having great word of mouth from the initial buyers.  The upside is the product is so intriguing and innovative that it has a high curiosity factor.