Weight Watchers, Wellness and Consumer Targeting
It's Fun Fact Friday
One of the great things about working at Simmons is access to oodles and oodles of data (yes, that’s a scientific term!). We are constantly uncovering interesting nuggets as we work with our clients and now with Brand and Research Catalyst, finding those nuggets has become even easier! With so many interesting tidbits popping up in our new platform, we decided to share the love and implement “Fun Facts Friday” on our blog. Each Friday we’ll share something interesting the team has come across and let you in on the data fun too.
This week has been all about the rebrands. From donuts getting dropped like hot potatoes to Weight Watchers shedding the weight of extra letters, brands have been shaking things up. We decided to take a look at what WW’s expanded focus means from a target audience perspective.
Right now Weight Watchers’ consumers skew heavily female (85%) and 43% of them are over the age of 55. Compare this to a broader target definition of US adults who agree they try to eat healthy foods and maintain a balanced diet. Now you’ve added a larger portion of the male population and broadened your generational reach to include more adults under the age of 45. The total audience reach jumps from 3.5% of the population to over ½ of the population. Obviously this is a very broad consumer target definition, but it points to the expansion capabilities the WW team is trying to pull off.
A sheer audience expansion obviously isn’t the only thing on the WW team’s mind. This expanded target has serious implications on messaging, products, and partnerships. Our Brand Catalyst tool easily exposed some of the new brand partnerships the WW might want to explore as they align with this target market. Trader Joe’s and Chobani both top the list of favored brands for our healthy-minded target. The team may want to reconsider its prepackaged meal strategy for a target that is more interested in natural foods versus the processed dinners and meal replacements of the core Weight Watchers’ target. Getting this broader target onboard with the WW vision will be confounded by getting them to buy. Our data show this new target indexes lower on our "propensity to buy" scale.
However the WW teams attacks this transformation, it will be interesting to watch and see how their profile changes from the current Weight Watcher’s consumer target we see now. Maybe we’ll need to dedicate a future Fun Fact Friday blog to that analysis!
See you next week!
