If it can't be tracked electronically, it doesn't matter. That might be the consequence of living in this era of disruption. To stay centered, we want to log everything.
That's what distressed Weight Watchers is finding out.
In Bloomberg, Annie Massa reports:
"Weight Watchers is losing the race for customers against fitness gadgets. Revenue fell 10 percent ... declining for the eighth straight period as FitBit, Jawbone and other activity trackers lure dieters away."
Clearly, the takeaway for thought leaders is to create a bond with followers by providing them something to track. All the time. If your message deals with the need to invest for retirement, then they should be tracking weekly the current and future cost of living in the one, two or three locations they will live in after they finish their careers. The must indicators to check would be housing prices, property taxes, cost of dental implants and food for two.
The shrewd pioneers who founded the Twelve Step Programs had members track daily how long they had been off the bottle. That's reinforced at meetings with the giving of recognition chips for 24 hours, one month, 60 days, 90 days, six months, one year and multiples of years. If you're part of the in-crowd, there might even be a cake to celebrate.
And in those scary days when I hung out a shingle at the end of the 1980s, I tracked how many pieces of marketing snail mail I would send out. No, I didn't compute the ROI on that. The tracking was enough to keep me going. Today, I still track, only it's the digital communications. Without tracking I lose my selling motivation.
It should have dawned on Weight Watchers to create an app to track the changes within the body which signal emotional messages to eat, when not hungry. The meetings would be packed.