What you can learn from Whoop’s consistent experience

Fitness tracker Whoop has a strong brand positioning, cementing the brand as the top wearable that allows athletes to, as their mission outlines, ‘unlock human performance’. In doing so, it distanced itself from the 10,000-step crowd and promised clear analysis of how your body performs & recovers.

Their brand positioning is well-defined and unique. When you look across their brand every aspect of their product, content or experiences is designed to deliver upon it. Many brands often fail to ensure that the entirety of their brand experience delivers on their desired positioning. Developing a good brand positioning is one thing, but delivering on it entirely another. Whoop has been successful in ensuring that each element of its ecosystem has delivered on its desired approach.

Developing Brand Experience Principles is one of the easiest ways to ensure that everything across a business delivers on a Brand Positioning. For Whoop it’s possible to extrapolate out of their positioning key elements that exist across all areas of their product.

Scientific and Accessible

Their app and content includes a substantial amount of scientific information and research. The key for the brand, though, is that this content is accessible and easy to understand. It’s the big difference between a pure science-based application and a consumer-facing product that makes scientific information understandable. Whoop even has an entire research team dedicated to interrogating its data; this is then turned into research papers, press releases and consumer-facing content.

Clinical and Personal

Whoop is delivering data that traditionally would be the remit of the medical industry. As a result, much of the type of content produced is clinical in the way it is delivered. This can come across as cold and impersonal. To counter that, Whoop has a personal touch, ensuring that all data is delivered into a one-to-one, engaging way.

Proactive and Authoritative

It can seem like a simple thing, but stating that your experience will be proactive rather than reactive has a big impact on what you develop. A reactive product tells you what you’ve done – for instance 'You've completed 10,000 steps today' – whereas a proactive product also delivers trends and information on what to do next to shift your behavior. As an example, Whoop does this by proactively informing you of the best time to go to sleep to perform the next day. The way that you deliver this type of information can be done in a multitude of ways, from fun, to nudge like but Whoop takes an authoritative tone that fits its scientific approach.

Competitive and Connected

Community can be developed in a wide variety of ways and the direction you give it heavily impacts the way it’s experienced by users. Without direction, a community can feel pointless or even overwhelming. There is a big difference between a non-competitive community and a competitive one. Whoop's community approach has a competitive edge, with leaderboards and notifications on group performance. Whereas some competitive communities merely show your place amongst the the rest, Whoop also connects you to other users around your interests or contacts.

Every brand, no matter the size, should develop a set of Brand Experience Principles to drive the development of their ecosystem. Without them, teams and business units can make strategic decisions that on the surface might seem minor but ultimately don’t create an experience that reflects the brand strategy.

THE TAKEAWAY

• Develop clear Brand Experience Principles to ensure your experience reflects your brand.

• Create clarity in the direction of key areas of the experience such as Community with the right approach.

GO DEEPER

• Explore the Scientific research studies leveraging Whoop data here.