Hey Weight Watchers, Keep Your Sights Off Our Teens

I’m trying to process this without losing my mind. 

“Weight Watchers expects the recruitment tactic could make young customers loyal for years.”

CNN just posted a news report about Weight Watchers' new marketing strategy to make their program free for 6 weeks to customers aged 13-17. They want to manipulate the emotions of vulnerable youths, hooking them on a lifestyle of dieting and chasing "wellness" so they will continue to buy their products forever. Weight Watchers is essentially asserting that health can definitely be achieved, but only if one is dependent on their programming. It's infuriating. 

Weight Watchers doesn’t work. Its success is entirely dependent on clients losing weight on an unsustainable diet, then rebounding and gaining weight back, and then relying on their program to then lose the weight again. This is how they survive. And now they have their sights firmly set on our youth to achieve their goals. This is why they need to create loyal customers - because if their program worked, people wouldn't need to re-up year after year after year.

3.5 million people are currently on WW, and the execs want 5 million by 2020. Go team! They plan to exploit insecurities that teens aren’t mature enough to have developed adequate protections against in order to make their quota. They’re grooming teens to become adults who believe that if the program doesn’t work it’s because there’s something wrong with them personally, not with the system. 

Weight Watchers is trying to shift their focus towards becoming a “health and wellness brand that helps people lead healthy lives.”

Thing is, dieting is not how you achieve health and wellness so if WW could take this disingenuous marketing nonsense and disappear forever that’d be great. 

Click on the image below to head to the CNN article, and accompanying video.