For Weight Watchers International CEO James R. Chambers, 2014 wasn’t as successful as he had hoped for from a customer engagement perspective.
Revenue dipped 14%, to $1.5 billion, in 2014, but also customer engagement and, ultimately, recruitment failed to meet company expectations.
“When we unveiled our multi-year transformation plan, we knew that 2014 would be a challenging year, but we hoped to achieve positive recruitment sometime during 2015 leading to revenue growth in 2016,” Chambers said during the company’s Feb. 26 fourth-quarter/full-year earnings conference call, according to Seeking Alpha. “Our plan was based on strong cost management, repositioning our brand, improving our product offering, and targeting new channel growth in health care. While we still believe firmly in our underlying strategies, our execution at the start of the year was not what we had hoped for and I am disappointed to say that we are not yet where we expected to be and that our turnaround will take longer than we had anticipated.”
That’s why the company is taking aggressive steps to adjust its marketing, to continue to improve consumer offerings in both meetings and online and to right-size its cost structure.
“During the fourth quarter we introduced a number of digital product enhancements, including improving our search functionality, enhancing the ease of use of our food and activity tracking, expanding our foot data base, and creating video content to enable members to more quickly mesh to the program,” Chambers explained.
Weight Watchers International enters the 2015 winter season with two objectives: To significantly improve its marketing execution and to launch enhancements to its products.
“We are taking a different tack in our communications then we have in the past. We crafted a two-step marketing strategy, beginning in late November with the launch of advertising spots which were meant to create a new conversation about our brand to follow up by call to actions spots beginning post-Christmas,” Chambers explained.
Weight Watchers’ Super Bowl spot and accompanying promotional offer integrated creative that drove engagement with a strong call to action.
“Our ad was ranked No. 2 by Forbes for social media engagement on Facebook among Super Bowl ads,” Chambers said. “This is clear proof that when
we get strong marketing execution we can move the needle. But I should caution that while this combination of marketing message and strong promotional offer drove short-term strength, year-over-year year-to-date recruitment still remained more negative than the overall suppressed levels we witnessed in 2014.”