Whoop’s CMO talks marketing around a fitness boom

The health and wellness space is booming, with the global market projected to reach over $11 trillion by 2034. One of the darlings of the space is Whoop, maker of screen-free wearable tech. It’s known for its subscription model (annual memberships start at $149) and was valued at $3.6 billion in 2021. Revenue Brew spoke with CMO John Sullivan about the messaging behind that growth and how to market for a new health ecosystem.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The fitness space seems to be in the middle of a boom. What’s it like marketing around all this increased interest?

It’s the golden age of health, performance, fitness, well-being, wellness in general…The golden age is this combination of the democratization of all of the inputs. You can go get a cancer screening, you can go get blood testing, you can get a continuous glucose monitor off the shelf. Whoop is really unique because we have continuous monitoring, but then you add that AI layer, you can ingest more data, make more sense of it, and make that experience more personalized than ever before.

With Whoop coming out with so many new products, how do you think about messaging around the ecosystem that is being created?

Our marketing playbook is pretty straightforward insofar as we try to make full-funnel impressions, generating awareness, telling people what it is about Whoop that should be considered, and ultimately helping them figure out exactly what problems we can solve for them.

We just announced recently this multiyear deal with the Ferrari F1 team…It’s cool to see Lewis Hamilton wearing Whoop, but it might be more important to you to understand how you can review a synapse or lose weight, or prevent prediabetes.

It’s interesting how your team has diversified collaborations with athletes, musicians, and influencers. How do you think about this internally?

We started to scale the brand and try to apply our lessons to a broader demographic, just opening the aperture more than anything. Instead of staying in sport and going more lifestyle, what we’ve instead done is we focus on performance as our wedge, like, what is a high-performance lifestyle? Performance is just health ambitiously applied. It’s the same core behaviors.

How do you create messaging around how people see fitness now, and how they could see it in the future?

That’s probably the single biggest tension we feel: You can’t be all things to all people all at once.

We think a lot about how to defend our leadership position in fitness while growing into new domains. Ultimately, where we’re finding the most success is around, even within that fitness crowd, trying to inform people how to take care of the whole person.

As consumers have educated themselves on health metrics like VO2 max and heart rate zones, how has that changed your job?

A lot of what I think about on the day to day is how to reach more people with more accessible stories…If you were going to try to run a marathon or a half marathon, once upon a time, you’d go to a website, you’d subscribe to something, and you download a PDF, and then you do that. Now you might ask Whoop Coach, or you might ask ChatGPT or Claude. The nature of storytelling is changing.

Whoop has grown so much in recent years, how do you create marketing to fuel that growth?

The world feels pretty small in terms of the emergence of the science around performance and health span and longevity. We spent a lot of time in the Middle East, Australia, all of those markets have the same sort of way into the conversation.Then the marketing therein does differ. Our model is that we put one person on the ground in each of our markets of focus in order that they can help adapt whatever it is we’re coming from.

What excites you the most about what Whoop can accomplish in the future?

The fact that we have all of this data about you through the lens of your health specifically…the fact that you can go into your Whoop app and have a conversation with a health and performance-specific coach that has all of this knowledge about you. You’re going to talk to your Whoop like a permanent, live-in health companion, and that’s really exciting.