Influx

It was staring us in the face all along, Weight Watchers is the ultimate Brand Utility. It’s wonderfully functional and the whole brand is geared around helping you achieve a very specific goal. It’s just not as sexy and cool as Nike Plus, that’s why we don’t think of the utility aspect and it’s been around for years, which also doesn’t help.

However, they Weight Watchers is online and the experience is very functional and  very Brand Utility.

Clive Thompson over at Wired thinks the experience is very much like an RPG..

“Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly gamelike. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG
game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan
for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells
– whoops, I mean foods — you can still use with your remaining
points.

And those 35 extra points you get every week? They’re like a special
buff or potion — a last-ditch save when you’re on the ropes.

Indeed, I’m in awe of the sheer brilliance of Weight Watchers in adopting the word points
as its metric for measuring food. The word immediately shoves the user
into the semantics — and fun — of gameplay. You regard losing weight
as an intriguing challenge, as opposed to a mere grind.”

Clive as give us all a clue as to where the future of Brand Utility lies.

“This puts me in mind of the talk that Jane McConigal- a brilliant and pioneering alternative-reality game designer — gave
at this year’s South by Southwest conference. She argued that game
designers ought to put their skills to use in the real world by reshaping dull, everydayday activities into fun challenges.”

So, it’s easy to see who can move into this space.

Clorox/Unilever/P&G- Home cleaning

AAA- Car maintenance

Whole Foods/Safeway/Kroger/Kaiser- Nutritious eating

etc….

Posted by Ed Cotton