The Battle of the Bulge: Does our favorite celebrity ambassador represent our favorite weight loss program?

January 10, 2012 | Comments Off

By Jennifer O’Brien

Happy New Year! Did you make a resolution for 2012? Many did and I’m sure that ‘shed a few pounds’ was at the top of the list for many people. Television commercials advertising weight loss programs are plentiful right now as weight loss companies vie for your hard-earned dollars. As always, celebrities are a key component of their commercials.  Jennifer Hudson has been the face of Weight Watchers for some time, and new commercials feature Mariah Carey using the Jenny Craig diet and Janet Jackson using Nutrisystem.

But does having the favorite celeb also mean having the favorite program?  Let’s take a look at what social media has to say.

We gathered hundreds of thousands of verbatims from thousands of different websites and evaluated opinions toward three weight loss companies. The first chart below shows opinions reflecting the spokesperson for each of the three companies. Although the percentage of comments that are negative (red) is about 14% to 16%  for all three brands, there is a higher percentage of positive comments (green) for Janet Jackson (29.8% positive).  The smallest percentage of positive comments goes to Mariah Carey (23.3% positive) while Jennifer Hudson (26.6% positive) sits in the middle.

Based on these results, Nutrisystem is winning the celebrity contest.  Does this mean their program is also preferred?

The next chart shows the percentage of comments/messages/ status updates that were scored as negative (red), neutral (blue) and positive (green) for each of the three companies overall.  This time, Weight Watchers has the lowest percent of negative comments (8.6%) AND the highest percentage of positive comments (33.5%), making it the social media fan favorite. Nutrisystem comes in second with 12.4% of comments being negative and 29.1% being positive. Finally Jenny Craig has the highest percentage of negative comments (14.0%) and the lowest percentage of positive comments (28.2%).

So what is our conclusion? The favored celebrity does not make the favored program. We love you Janet Jackson, but Weight Watchers is in the lead.

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Related links
Social media monitoring vs social media research: Can you see the difference?
The Conversition Hierarchy of Social Media Insight
Coke it is! Or not. I’m not sure. I can’t tell.
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Battle of the Brands: Blackberry vs iPhone

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