If you're giving yourself some slack over your diet and exercise regime at the moment, you're not alone according to weight loss company Weight Watchers (WW). The company says they are seeing evidence of people putting "diets on hold" as economies re-open, leading them to downgrade their profit forecasts for this year — a revelation that sent the WW share price down more than 25% on Wednesday.
The yo-yo business
The yo-yo effect in dieting is well documented. People who lose weight quickly find it easy to put the weight back on which, poetically, is sort of the inverse of Weight Watchers' business. Every year the company finds it easy to add hundreds of thousands of subscribers to its weight loss program in the first quarter of the year, folks who presumably want to get healthier after the holiday period (new year new me etc.). Then, throughout the year, the company slowly sheds subscribers who presumably either meet, or give up on, their health goals.
An out of date brand?
Weight Watchers might not be able to blame all of its problems on the end of lockdowns, or just regular seasonality. In 2018 the company decided to re-brand to just "WW", dropping the iconic name it first got in 1963, to some confusion. This re-brand followed a difficult few decades for the company, which increasingly faced competition from other companies and, eventually, the internet — which made sharing healthy eating tips and tricks a lot easier, and eventually helped kick-start the body positivity movement.
The WW name change may not have been a huge initial success, but the strategic vision for the company is probably sound. WW is moving away from a singular focus on "weight" towards one of more holistic wellness — spearheaded by spokesperson Oprah Winfrey, who bought a 10% stake in the company in 2015.
