Liz Josefsberg: Right on Target About Weight Loss Marketing
Healthy eating coach to the stars Liz Josefsberg went from working at a big brang to being the big brand. She weighs in on what’s broken with weight loss marketing and how not to “fire” your customer.
“What stuck with me when I was building my own brand was the importance of listening to the consumer and doing your research.”
By E.B. Moss
The punishment. The brief elation. The heartbreak. It’s what Liz Josefsberg calls the story of classic weight loss industry marketing, and she set out to tell a different tale.
Josefsberg, now a nationally renowned weight loss expert, went from digital marketing at Weight Watchers to literally writing the book on sustainable lifestyle changes and low carb dieting. Her own program, Target 100, has helped both celebrities (like Jennifer Hudson, Jessica Simpson, Katie Couric, and Charles Barkley) and everyday clients lose weight and escape punishing themselves after swallowing the message of a bad brand. (Spoiler alert: she thinks marketing “wellness” is a terrible idea).
One of your first forays into digital marketing was at Weight Watchers almost 20 years ago. Can you tell us what that was like?
It was interesting. This was in 2002 at the beginning of the dotcom boom and Weight Watchers didn't want their own website. So, they licensed the brand to some very smart venture capitalists, and I was brought in because they didn't have anybody on staff who knew about weight loss. [Josefsberg, herself, lost 65 pounds with Weight Watchers.] I knew the brand and the consumer and could tell them which tools were really needed. It was my job to say, “Hey, you know, this is what your consumer is really looking for.”
I actually ended up, and I think this goes to the relationship between brand and digital, running a weekly Weight Watchers meeting for the entire staff of weightwatchers.com. Everyone came, including the CEO, who ended up losing 40 pounds and, more importantly, really understanding the brand from the inside out. I think this is core to lifestyle brands—they need to be driven by people who have walked the walk. And because we had that we were able to build digital tools that went beyond marketing.
What was the most important thing about branding that you learned from this experience?
What stuck with me when I was building my own brand was the importance of listening to the consumer and doing your research. I remember when we started discussing doing an entirely online program: Weight Watchers had always been about the weekly meetings, so changing this was big. Talk about branding and research!
We did a big segmentation study where we actually broke down our entire following into something like 12 segments. One was the “support-seeking struggler,” which is somebody who has struggled with their weight forever and isn’t a self-motivated type. The support from the room is really important for this segment, so they wouldn’t do well in an online program. Knowing this, we were able to target the new program specifically to those people who were going to thrive in an online environment.
Weight Watchers has significantly rebranded in the last couple of years with the switch to the name WW and a focus on well-being. What do you think of this shift?
As someone who was behind the curtains for 11 years, I think this rebrand was a huge mistake for them. I mean, they were a weight loss company. Everyone knew what Weight Watchers was and then they said, “we’re not that anymore, now we’re about wellness.” People need and want weight loss. Wellness is not resonating; it’s so overdone. You don't go to Weight Watchers for wellness, whatever that is, you're going there for weight loss. In my opinion, they just fired their customer.
“This rebrand was a huge mistake for them… You don’t go to Weight Watchers for wellness, whatever that is. You’re going there for weight loss. In my opinion, they just fired their customer.”
You left Weight Watchers (before the rebrand) and went on to start your own weight loss company. What did you want to do differently when it came to your brand?
When I left Weight Watchers, I spent about four years working on projects for other weight loss companies with different approaches and used myself as a human guinea pig. I wanted to know it what was like to do this keto thing, or to try intermittent fasting, or what it feels like to be a vegan. This gave me a 6,000-foot view of the weight loss industry and one thing really struck me: this is the only product in the world where people go in and hand you money and when the product doesn't work, they blame themselves. That breaks my heart. With one trending brand, if you're not perfect and you go off this list by even one ingredient after 17 days, you're a bad person, you've done wrong, and you need to go back to the beginning. That’s the tone of this industry. It’s so punishing. And that’s what I'm trying to play against.
How did you come up with your program, Target 100, and the branding around it?
I loved how Weight Watchers gamified weight lost, but points were hard—why are we counting all these numbers to get one number to then subtract our exercise points, etc. I knew whatever I came up with had to be simple, and I knew I wanted it to have pillars beyond just what we eat.
I started with counting carbs. Carbs are kind of the devil in our society right now, they’re the processed sugars and that’s where all the danger lies. So that one came first. As always, I did a lot of research. There were tons of studies on 100 grams of carbs being a wonderfully livable number. It's not a magic number, 100, but around that level is livable while also creating enough attention on what you’re eating to promote weight loss.
The 100 worked and I realized it worked for all of the pillars I had in mind—food, water, movement, exercise, stress, and sleep. The recommendation for women is 96 ounces of water a day and for men it's like 112. So, I thought, I’ll just say it's 100. Same thing with movement—if the goal is 10,000 steps a day and I only get 7,529, it shouldn’t feel like a failure. I tried to simplify that with 100 minutes of moving a week, that way someone could do it on their lunch hours. I was on the treadmill, I can remember it like was yesterday, when this was just dropping into my brain. I literally got off and started writing.
How did you start your branding efforts? And what metrics do you use for measuring success?
Much of my marketing was grassroots from the beginning. I had a platform because I had been a national spokesperson for years and had been on Good Morning America, and Dr. Oz, and Oprah. I wrote the book, and I gave classes, and I did interviews, and went on podcasts. Podcasts are great marketing, by the way, because they have a target audience already.
I spent $0 on marketing and grew my online community to 100,000 people.
Now of course, we're tracking everything and that's the beauty of technology. Like with my newsletter: through Mailchimp you can track who is opening it, and then who is signing up from my beginner course; or maybe they’re not ready to take a $500 course, so they sign up for the 30-day scale challenge. We’re looking at Facebook analytics, Instagram, the back end of Stripe. We can see who interacts with the content we send out, who views the program. We’re just doing a lot of testing, figuring out how to introduce them to the brand, what language works, and what we need to offer them.
February 1, 2021
