Rich is Easier Than Skinny

Oprah has proven the point again that making a boatload of money is way easier then being thin. Last week while I was at the gym working out at eight in the morning I glanced up at the financial news playing silently on the TV. As the most active stocks scrolled by on the bottom of the screen I caught a surprising glimpse of Weight Watchers, which was up from $6 a share to $10. Something big was happening, I thought and I should have guessed that the jump was all due to a celebrity.
Latter in the day I learned that Oprah had bought ten percent of the weight loss biz and more than doubled her forty million dollar investment. Brilliant, but I saw her on TV and she said that Weight Watchers had approached her in July and she did not want to invest until she had tried the diet. She did and in about two months had lost about fifteen pounds. I guess she was happy enough to buy into the company.
Now the fact that she more than doubled her money in a week shows it was a good move, but maybe she could have done better. See, I don’t think the analysts who are saying buy WW on Oprah’s association are going to stick around if the company fundamentally does not improve.
Seems to me the whole deal would have been a lot more successful if Oprah had kept it quiet that she was doing Weight Watchers for a few months and had continued to lose, hopefully as much as fifty pounds. That would have made people take notice and not just want to buy Weight Watchers stock, which is all well and good, but the millions of overweight Oprah lovers would have joined Weight Watchers because of Oprah’s success.  
Having real customers hanging on every Oprah word as she talked about changing her life with Weight Watchers would be a much better long term situation for the company than just the news that the still fairly big Oprah was buying the stock. The bottom line is just owning Weight Watchers stock does not make you skinny, it still takes counting points to do that.
So in Oprah’s case it was a hell of a lot easier to make forty million dollars in a week than it was to lose ten pounds. Too bad that is not a skill she can share with many people. Being a market mover is something that is limited to a handful of influencers.
Good luck to Oprah on Weight Watchers. I highly endorse it for anyone who has a lot of weight to lose, but like all diets you have to actually follow it. I wonder if Oprah is going to meetings? It would be great publicity to see her weighing in with the rest of humanity in a church basement. Really the best marketing WW could do is to have Oprah travel the country and drop in on different meetings and surprise the attendees. That would really get attendance up and then maybe the stock would actually be worth the amount the Oprah affect had on it.