What we can learn from Weight Watchers as a distributed community model
A sense of community is integral—not adjacent—to the value Weight Watchers offers members. Here’s how they built it.
At People & Company, we’re always looking for interesting communities to inspire our project work. We’ve interviewed everyone from early influencers on Mariah Carey’s first online fan forum to Lululemon’s brand ambassadors in Asia.
When I sense I’ve been citing the same community as an example over and over again, that’s my signal that there’s something truly special about them. Previously, I’ve written about the Rapha Cycling Club and Edcamp.
Today, I’ll take a deeper look at my latest distributed community muse: Weight Watchers.
Jean Nidetch on WW’s 20th anniversary in 1983. (Associated Press)
First, some Weight Watchers history
In 1963, Jean Nidetch held the first Weight-Watchers meeting above a movie theater in Queens.
Weight Watchers’ signature program was born out of personal experience. Jean was finally able to lose the weight she wanted in her late 30s when she went to a city-run obesity clinic. She kept the diet the program gave her, mimeographed it and handed it out to a group of six friends that she invited to her apartment. The meetings grew in size, Jean ran out of chairs, found a formal space, and Weight Watchers (“WW”) was born.
Jean’s approach — a clear weight loss strategy and a heavy dose of directness about dieting — was a breath of fresh air for people in the 1960s who were mostly left to worry and wonder privately about what they might do to lose weight.
Jean knew from the very first days that the problem wasn’t just food. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner writes in this beautiful, frank piece: “What fat people needed was one another. They needed a space in which they could talk openly about the physical struggles and daily humiliations of walking around in a fat body, and just how much that sucked.”
Jean’s model of programming and social support spread quickly and organically. Some of the people who went to WW in New York and experienced incredible results were so inspired that they opened a franchise when they moved elsewhere.
After researching Weight Watchers, three community-building insights stick out to me:
Community Insight #1:
Shared interests get you to show up. Great people keep you coming back.
The 10th anniversary of Weight Watchers in Times Square, 1973. (Credit Anthony Camerano/Associated Press)
“People find that they need structure, tools, and support to be successful. They need a community.”
— Mindy Grossman, Weight Watchers CEO
Community is a fundamental piece of WW’s value proposition, not a program adjacent to the business model.
They know that relationships with other people give human beings the accountability and inspiration that motivates us to lose weight. And they also know that meaningful human connections last long past the tools, training, or information we first show up for. Relationships are “sticky” — they’re what keep us coming back to many shared endeavors, from Weight Watchers to team sports to church.
But crucially, Weight Watchers also understands that you have to first build something valuable before a group of people will rally around it. As the current CEO Mindy Grossman has said:
You can’t say, “I’m starting a movement,” it doesn’t work. You have to build something, and it builds upon itself and then becomes one.
People come to Weight Watchers first and foremost to lose weight. There’s a very real, very vulnerable need that WW promises to fulfill. And it may be hard to remember now, but in my early days at Instagram we heard over and over that people downloaded the app for the filters that made their mobile photos better, not the social feed.
Remember that whenever you’re building: we may show up for an offering, but we come back for the people. We sign up for things we think we need (like weight loss guidance) but we stick around for how that thing makes us feel — for the folks we meet and the sense of belonging we experience when we gather together.
Community Insight #2:
Role models bring to life what’s possible.
Jackie Conn in 1977. Over the course of 25 years with WW, Jackie went from being a member, to a Leader, to a General Manager. More here.
For any community to function, people need clear roles. What’s expected of me now?
For a community to thrive, people need a growth path. Who could I become if I stay involved and put in extra work?
That’s where role models come in. Role models illustrate where participating in a community can take you. Like great case studies or use cases, these people show other members how to behave to fit in and how to contribute in an impactful way.
Of course, Weight Watchers has signed on some seriously big names as role models — celebrities like Oprah and even DJ Khaled.
A vintage WW Lifetime member pin.
But to me they have even better role models in their Lifetime members. These are people who have “hit their goal weight and maintain it by weighing no more than two pounds over that goal for six weeks.” They can go to unlimited meetings, provided they continue to weigh-in close to their goal weight.
One step above the Lifetime member is a Meeting Leader. Meeting Leaders are Lifetime members who apply to become paid WW employees. They have very real responsibilities, including conducting group meetings, weighing members, showing them how to follow the weight loss plan, and motivating people to reach their goals.
Meeting Leaders and Lifetime members bring the WW program’s impact to vivid life more sincerely than a cold call, celebrity social media post, or advertisement ever could.
And, what’s more, they are WW’s boots on the ground. They bring the local meetings to life and are energy nodes online, ensuring the drumbeat of conversation continues.
In this way, Weight Watchers knows the biggest secret to cultivating community: Building a community isn’t about management. It’s about cultivating leaders.
Community Insight #3:
Members have clear reasons to interact (and bountiful spaces to do so).
Another strength of the Weight Watchers community is how they’ve carved out a number of spaces for members to share valuable information like recipes and exercise ideas with one another day after day.
WW’s Offline Community
Weight Watchers is known for its in-person meetings. As of 2017, WW was hosting 15,000 weekly meetings in the U.S. and 32,000 around the world. These meetings happen everywhere from big cities like New York to small towns in less populated states like Wyoming.
Members can attend meetings anywhere in the world. For some, these simple, ritualized in-person gatherings bring tremendous meaning. Here’s Brodesser-Akner again:
The people, mostly women, in the folding chairs had one rule, though: No matter what happened during the week, you showed up. ‘‘This is my church,’’ a woman named Donna told me. A few months before, she buried her mother on a Friday; on Saturday she came to the meeting.
No matter where you attend a meeting, you can expect these codified “five unintimidating steps”:
Meeting/saying hello to the WW team.
Private weigh ins. Don’t worry: “You don’t have to weigh yourself in front of everyone.”
30-minutes of programming. Topics are always related to weight loss and healthy living.
A room of allies. “Every person in the room has been in your shoes and has your back. That’s the beauty of Weight Watchers!”
A “Getting To Know You” session afterwards that’s optional and short.
The format of these meetings is simple, which means Meeting Leaders can replicate the events around the world with some level of consistency.
Most importantly, WW carves out spaces for personal interaction among both members and staff. Those little moments are what form our deepest bonds. Here’s my bud Amy Reeder, a current Weight Watchers member:
“A big part of meetings is really just members speaking up and giving advice when others have questions or low times.
Also, very corny, but it helps: you get a little star sticker to put in your book when you give some good advice or did something you’re proud of that you share.”
In holding space for these little interactions, WW creates an environment that welcomes contribution and helps members build sincere friendships.
WW’s Online Community
Starting in the early 2000s, Weight Watchers began its migration online. For the first 15 years, they had a free, public community forum where people could swap fitness tips, recipes, or give each other nudges to keep at it. Then in 2015, Weight Watchers replaced their public forum with a private digital space called Connect, which costs $19.95 to join.
By charging money and making the community private, members are safer from trolls and assured more meaningful interactions. One reporter called Connect “the only good social media network.” But lots of members were upset about the change (“Years of friendships, advice, etc. GONE without any warning.”… “I’m disappointed that I don’t have access to their forums any more. Sometimes reading them is what got me to rejoin. Being/staying in touch.”) Some people migrated to unofficial WW platforms, like fan Facebook Pages and forums.
Here’s my take. No matter the platform, WW is accomplishing the ultimate goal: more dialogue.The WW community is having online conversations that members find valuable and easy to join.
That’s crucial because the functional unit of any community is dialogue. Open and ongoing dialogue transforms a loose group of people with a shared interest into a community that can share stories, support each other, and pursue collective goals.
With their migration online, Weight Watchers gave up some control over the facilitation of conversations, but also reduced their role as middleman. That’s allowed for more free-flowing conversation between members, which is the ultimate goal. The richer the 1:1 connections, the stronger the community.
Conclusion
What Jean Nidetch started with a group of friends in her Queens apartment has transformed into 30,000+ in-person meetings every week around the world, all authentically run by WW veterans. Many more WW members connect every day online.
Despite their immense size, WW has kept the value of their members’ sense of belonging intact. That combination of having a deep impact at scale makes WW a model for all of us working with communities to look up to.
Most of all, the Weight Watchers story is an uplifting reminder that big communities start small. That if you can fill a need that taps into a shared interest, you might just get many, many people to show up for it. In the case of Weight Watcher’s, Jean’s early instincts that she might know a way to help others proved resonant in a way she could’ve never imagined.
At that first gathering … I told my story, and the beautiful thing was that people really listened. And then they began talking and contributing one at a time. At that moment, all of us in that room became allies.
— Jean Nidetch
So, follow your gut sharers, helpers, connectors. And remember: the magic’s in the doing. Get out and gather. ✌
This case study was produced by the team at People & Company.
We published a book, host a podcast, and we work with organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider as strategy partners, bringing confidence to how they’re building communities.
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