The Challenge

Weight Watchers, an established and respected brand for healthy weight loss, faced a critical challenge. Although known for its effectiveness, it was perceived as old-fashioned and lacking relevance in the modern health and wellness landscape. The traditional Meetings business was in decline, and Weight Watchers Online, considered the brand’s growth engine, was not performing as expected, failing to match the agility of a startup.

The Solution

We initiated an extensive consumer segmentation study to unearth the primary driver behind why consumers choose a weight loss program and highlighted unique opportunities within different target segments for our various businesses. Building upon these insights, we developed a robust umbrella brand strategy that would serve as the cornerstone for our global rebrand and relaunch.

The highlight of this transformation was a blockbuster, omni-channel brand marketing campaign, showcasing Jennifer Hudson’s inspirational success. This campaign marked the first major relaunch of the Weight Watchers Program in a decade. Additionally, this new umbrella brand strategy informed the highly successful Weight Watchers Online campaign. Leveraging the momentum and success, we introduced the brand’s first-ever marketing campaign targeting men, featuring Charles Barkley, which was a breakthrough moment for the brand.

The Results

The impact of our efforts was phenomenal. Weight Watchers Online achieved impressive growth of 82%, while Weight Watchers Online for Men more than doubled its user base. Even Weight Watchers Meetings, previously on the decline, saw a resurgence with remarkable growth of 27%. As a result of this transformation, the stock price tripled in just one year.

​​Weight Watchers Health Solutions (Weight Watchers for Business)

The Challenge

Weight Watchers was running meetings at small businesses and schools across the US for years. This small business was declining and dated, and the model was clunky – employees had to work hard to get friends interested in bringing Weight Watchers to work, and employers were not fully supporting it. These programs were seen as nice-to-haves if a self-appointed employee would oversee logistics, and it was disconnected from any employer-sponsored programs.

The Solution

We saw an opportunity to pivot this small operation to a new, growth-driving business for Weight Watchers. After market and trend analyses and gathering insights from our larger corporate clients, we developed a new line of business, Weight Watchers Health Solutions, that could be fully integrated into companies’ current health plans. We gave employers a turn-key, proven weight loss program to improve population health and create healthy communities and created programs to encourage subsidies and reimbursements to drive enrollment and engagement. After building a full sales and account management team dedicated to employers with 5,000+ employees, a new reporting system enabled corporations to see the impact of the program on health metrics and return on investment.

Results

We built the enterprise business to over $60MM in revenue, and it’s continued to be a big revenue driver for Weight Watchers, today called Weight Watcher for Business. Clients offering WW enjoy improvements in employee health, lower healthcare costs, increased productivity, and decreases in absenteeism. Large clients have stayed with WW through an increasingly crowded weight loss landscape; Labcorp, Humana, The City of New York, are some of the key clients who’ve been with the program for nearly 10 years.