How MyFitnessPal built a 250M customer base
In a world where TikTok spins out health fads faster than you can blink - how do you build and sustain a wellness brand that’s trusted by 250 million people? According to Marnie Boyer, CMO of MyFitnessPal, it starts with listening and evolves with innovation. In this episode of The CMO Show, Marnie shares how the world’s original fitness tracking app grew into – and remains - a global wellness platform.
AI as a tool for listening and learning
Rather than viewing AI as a threat, Marnie sees it as a powerful enabler. Her team uses AI to process massive volumes of user-generated content, like Reddit threads and app reviews to identify patterns, pain points, and opportunities. This allows them to respond faster, update FAQs, and refine messaging in real time. They’ve even used AI to analyse TikTok videos for nutritional accuracy, discovering that only a small fraction of content offered sound advice. This insight fuels their myth-busting campaigns, helping users navigate the noise with confidence.
Community-powered growth
With a database built by users around the world, MyFitnessPal reflects diverse cultures, cuisines, and goals. From Vegemite toast to protein-packed smoothies, the app’s food database is a living, breathing reflection of its global community. Marnie shares how the team uses social listening tools and direct user feedback to stay in tune with evolving needs. AI helps them sift through massive volumes of data to identify trends, address concerns, and even shape product development. The result? A platform that’s not only informed by experts but also shaped by everyday users, creating a virtuous cycle of trust and relevance.
The power of micro-influencers
MyFitnessPal’s influencer strategy is rooted in authenticity and relatability. Instead of relying solely on celebrity endorsements, the brand partners with micro-influencers who speak directly to niche communities. This approach allows the brand to scale trust and relevance across diverse demographics, while also tapping into the power of peer-to-peer recommendations. “We want to be where people are already having conversations about health...and that’s often with people they trust, not just big names,” Marnie said.
At its core, MyFitnessPal’s marketing strategy is about building relationship through understanding the emotional drivers behind health decisions and offering evidence-based support that feels personal, not proscriptive.
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This episode of The CMO Show was brought to you by host Mark Jones, producers Kate Zadel and Kirsten Bables and audio engineers Ed Cheng and Daniel Marr. This is an edited excerpt of the podcast transcript.
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Mark Jones
In marketing, we love to say that we listen to our customers and we take on their advice. But what about if you actually took that a step further and trusted your customers to build information, to become trusted sources of data, of advice, of activities that other customers could use in their everyday lives, how would that change the way you do your job?
Hello. Welcome to the CMO Show. We are a podcast that has been around for 10 years, produced by Impact Institute in partnership with our friends at Adobe. Today we're going to do something a little bit different. We do a lot of B2B conversations. This time it's B2C and we're going back to the OG of fitness apps. It's MyFitnessPal, perhaps you use it. They're in 120 countries around the world. It's quite remarkably loved by millions of people, and I say remarkably because the reviews are many and very high rates really, really well.
And there's something to learn from their story about how you build and sustain a community over a period of time. In fact, 20 years in that case. So I have with me Marnie Boyer, who is the CMO of MyFitnessPal, and she tells a bit of her story. She also talks about how the app works. So there's lots of insights there in how to build a product that's sustainable and grows over time. Also of interest is how she thinks about communities, about working with influencers, and then using the data that you collect in those spaces to inform not just product development, but also your go-to-market and the way that you continue to build out the organisation over time. It's a really fascinating story, so let's get stuck into it.
Well, thanks for joining us on the CMO Show. My guest today is Marnie Boyer. She is CMO at MyFitnessPal. Marnie, thanks for joining us from the States. It's great to have you with us.
Marnie Boyer
Yes, thank you so much for having me.
Mark Jones
Now, for those of us who don't know what MyFitnessPal is, I'd love a quick top level summary.
Marnie Boyer
Sure, sure. Well, MyFitnessPal is actually the original fitness tracking app. We allow our customers to track everything from their nutrition to how much they're working out, their sleep. We're used to track your macros to track against your goals, so it's an iPhone and an Android app. We even have a website where people can use that to track against any kind of goal that they have. It could be losing weight, gaining muscle, getting back into shape, trying to just walk that first couple of miles. So we have a lot of on-scale victories as well as non-scale victories that we help support our customers reach.
Mark Jones
So good. Now, when you say original, what do you mean by that?
Marnie Boyer
We started actually 20 years ago. We had just had our 20th anniversary and we were started by a man who was getting married and he and his fiancé wanted to figure out how to lose a few pounds for the wedding and they said there's no real easy way to do this. There's a lot of putting it in notebooks and journals and things like that. Wouldn't it be great if there was a website that allowed people to do that? And he started that website 20 years ago and was actually one of the very first apps on the Apple Store. So that's why I say the original because we really invented the category.
Mark Jones
Look, that's quite remarkable. I think, if I'm not mistaken, you came out before there was the phrase there's an app for that?
Marnie Boyer
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, we really continue to evolve along with all the different apps in the store. So we're original but also really innovative and trying to stay on top of all the latest technology.
Mark Jones
Yeah, it's fascinating to think. I think probably more than one listener might now might be having their mind blown, just to think that there's apps that have been around for 20 years. I'm interested in your story because coming into an organisation from a whole bunch of different backgrounds and experiences, I'm interested to know what's been in it for you? What's the driving appeal as a CMO?
Marnie Boyer
Yeah, I mean, what I really love about being a CMO is that I love being a consumer. I love shopping and buying things, and then that has really stimulated my interest in understanding why people, other people do what they do, why they buy what they buy. So I've always been in consumer businesses. When I was at AT&T, I was in our consumer business. I've been at Grubhub. At Capital One we have credit cards in the U.S. So I just love to be part of people's deeply personal decision making and try to understand how you can influence that through marketing.
Mark Jones
The interesting moment that we're in right now with a move towards AI of course, is big question marks about the future of apps and how we use them and how they evolve and how they change. And I got to even say just broadly speaking, we don't think a lot about apps anymore, even though they're still fundamental to how we use our smartphones every day, right? But there's a bit of a change in focus I think for a lot of consumers around the experience of using smartphones and devices more broadly. We are seeing it from a far more interactive voice-based type approach to maybe some of the traditional ways that we've thought about apps. And I'm interested from a very broad point of view we can drill into some specifics. But I'm interested in your take on some of these big trends because surely as you've come into the role, you start thinking about, "Well, what's the next 20 years going to look like?"
Marnie Boyer
Yeah, totally. I mean, you're right, people are allowing their phone to interact a lot with their apps on their devices. So I think there's going to be some evolution where it's really important to have a trusted source. Right now, if you were to ask AI or ChatGPT anything about nutrition, you would get so much information and some of it would be right, some of it would be right for you, and some of it would just be stuff that you would not want to put any of your know physical well-being entrusted into because it's really built on information, some of it good, some of it bad. And so what I think our app does and any app that specialises in a certain thing is it gives you a narrower lens to have that information curated for you. And it could be curated to what your needs are, gaining weight, losing weight, health and wellness, longevity, or it could be just taking out some of the misinformation.
And we are really bound legally and ethically to provide information that is the best for our consumers. We don't tell you you're going to lose 30 pounds. That's really a result of some of the advice that we give and some of the ways we allow you to track, but we're not going to make over promise. And I do think that in the short term, there will be too much information for consumers to be able to sift through and they'll rely on apps. And then over time, apps like MyFitnessPal or any of the apps you really love to use will be fully integrated with those experiences that you like. Like the ChatGPT, we have voice logging, we have where you can use your camera to take pictures of your food. So we will start to, it will blur the lines, but I think the thing that stands behind an app like MyFitnessPal is that you can trust it and that the advice or that the information behind it is scientifically based. We have an entire team of nutrition experts and doctors who are telling us what's right and what's wrong in nutrition.
Mark Jones
Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like a trust story. I'm interested in your take on the mindset of your customers and how that's changing or trust is if you like the foundation or the starting point, but how is it evolving? What are they thinking about within the community? And the reason I ask that, of course, is just to give you a bit of a shout-out. I saw one of the reviews, you've got like 4.7 out of five rating from nearly 140,000 reviews. So that's a lot of people saying nice things about you. It's also a responsibility to look after the hearts and minds of these people.
Marnie Boyer
That's right. Well, and that is the core of what we do today. That really does differentiate us from apps or websites or even just ChatGPT, who can provide you a lot of information, but you can also tell it to tell you something. So we don't get heavily influenced by where the market is headed. But you're right, we do care about what our consumers do, and we have over 20 people running our customer support, and they're behind the scenes. They are everywhere from responding to your comments on Facebook, Reddit, they'll answer your messages if you send us a message personally, and we're always collecting their stories. The consumer stories are what fuels MyFitnessPal. A lot of people hear about it from a friend.
So a lot of those reviews are on the app store of course, but a lot of them are, "Hey, have you tried this? This has really worked for me." And those aren't necessarily recorded anywhere. They're really just the stories that friends tell friends or family tells family. And that hasn't changed. And I think that'll become even more important when there's just so many choices and so many ways to get the same information. People will just say, "How do you get it? How do you stay so focused on your health?" Because people will have too many choices to go forward.
Mark Jones
Tell me about your experience, how do you represent that customer voice and the mindset? And I imagine you've probably got all sorts of different persona across the spectrum of people who use it and you need to be taking in all of that information, of course. And then reflecting that back into the business and the senior leadership. How do you go about making sure you've got your finger on the pulse?
Marnie Boyer
Well, I mean, what we do is we listen to our customers. They could be in those reviews and if we get a not so nice one, we are also on top of those, right? If anything comes up on Reddit or any of those things, we're always responding and using that information. Actually, my team was able to go through Reddit threads and actually take all those comments, load them into ChatGPT and say, "What's going on with our customers?" So that way we wouldn't have to read so many comments because we have so many mentions on Reddit and other threads like that. And it was able to help us not only answer questions that our customers have, add more FAQs to the site...
It's not only answer questions that our customers have, add more FAQs to the site, but also come up with messaging that would really resonate with them. We also do a tonne of consumer studies. We are trying to understand how people use devices, how people use medications, how people use any kind of new fitness wearables and things like that, and what they really want and who they trust and how they get their information. So like you said, we did a study where we asked people, "How do you get information about fitness and nutrition?" And some very high percentage of them said, "TikTok."
And so we did a study and we looked at, we basically loaded all these TikTok videos into ChatGPT, and we asked it, "What percent of this is true?" And it was something like 2% of what TikTok was saying was true, good nutritional advice, and the rest was probably clickbait, if nothing else. And so we're constantly listening not only to what customers are saying, but kind of going where they are so that we can help them find the right information and discount. We have myth busting that we do every year to make sure people aren't following any trends that don't make a tonne of sense.
Mark Jones
What's interesting about that is you're a scale story. So 250 million users, 120 countries, you are dealing with a volume of data there, which of course means you've got to start looking at AI engines to get some clarity across large data sets. That makes a lot of sense to me. How do you get the golden thread through all of that, while at the same time being able to segment messages down into particular groups across that incredible spread of humans?
Marnie Boyer
Yeah. I mean, we have the benefit of these amazing media platforms that have really kind of figured out how to target down to some of the most detailed needs. We use AI in those platforms, but also we can generate so much content. We have so many influencers and so many people who want to talk about our product organically and as well as through paid relationships that we're able to reach a lot of people and the algorithms have sort of perfected themselves.
So if I care about maybe losing a few pounds after a baby, or I'm getting ready for my wedding, or it's swimsuit season, or it's like new year, new me, and I want to really give it a try this year, or if it's anything, you know, there's even a focus on protein right now. People are really trying to see the merits of using fueling their bodies instead of starving their bodies over the years. And instead of having to say, "Okay, let's manually segment this and pull a list or something," we really know that the algorithms will find people because they are searching other information and that's where they are.
Mark Jones
What have you found is different about different cultures and people groups and the way that they consume information or maybe their food choices? And as you're speaking, one of the things that I've been thinking about is obviously the food preferences in the US are much different to many other countries around the world, right.
Marnie Boyer
Yes
Mark Jones
So there's all sorts of mindsets that drive the way that we think and behave. And I'm curious in some of the differences you've seen.
Marnie Boyer
Yeah, I mean, what's really cool about having a database like ours, it is built by all of our consumers. So if you have your first Vegemite burger, I don't know if that's a thing, but-
Mark Jones
It's really not.
Marnie Boyer
It's not? Okay, okay.
Mark Jones
Vegemite toast I'll give you. Yeah, yeah.
Marnie Boyer
Okay. All right. So if you're having your first Vegemite toast, that first person who loaded up Vegemite toast into our database is the person who has now provided that for everyone else to use. And every day there's someone going to a new culture, a new fusion, and they're able to load that information in. And we have a barcode scanner, so if it's a packaged food in any country anywhere, we can add that into our database as well. So we're sort of crowdsourced in that way that people, there's no one database of all the foods in the world, but our consumers, because they represent so many people, so many cultures, we're able to pick up on all those different foods and then you can pretty much go anywhere and find it in MyFitnessPal.
Mark Jones
So that's a really important insight, which means that you're trusting the expertise of the users within the community and curating that rather than you like a centralised model. How do you manage that over time?
Marnie Boyer
That's a great question because we trust but verify. So we have a problem if everyone puts in the food over and over with slightly different calories or fats or whatever. So there's definitely oversight. And guess what? We're using AI to improve our database every day. And before AI, it was probably just regular machine learning, but we really want to reduce the complexity. So if you go in there and type banana, we don't want you to have to choose through 30 bananas. There's just sort of one average standard banana out there. Same thing with a lot of different foods. So we do allow people to add it, but we also make it really easy to find existing foods. So we probably add less and less food every day than we did at the beginning, but we're also in the back backend cleaning up any kind of misinformation or maybe someone spelled something wrong. We're cleaning that up on the backend with AI and machine learning.
Mark Jones
Here at the CMO Show, we're celebrating 10 years of podcasting. We are the OG of CMO podcasts, and I'm so glad that you are with us in this community. We'd love you to subscribe to us, of course, in Apple Podcasts, in Spotify. You can find us on LinkedIn.
We'd also want to encourage you, if there's a marketer or a CMO in your network that needs to hear one of our episodes, share it. Let them know because that's how we can grow and how we can connect with more people and make every episode even better. Thanks for being, again, part of this community. I'll speak to you soon.
One of the harsh realities of dealing with a wide consumer audience is that, look, I'm just going to put my little pinky toe in the conspiracy theory water to make a point, which is that there are some people who have some pretty wild ideas out there. And one of those things is the... I'm going to use cereal as an example. I've lived in America. There is one if not more cereal aisles. You've got too much choice for a particular category of food, in my opinion, right.
And actually certain types of foods can be had in moderation, not to excess, but there are very powerful marketing and lobby groups that try to steer people in a particular way. And I'm picking on that for example, 'cause in my own experience, I've had a lot of learning in this space, and I err on protein, for example, in the morning as opposed to a cereal, which doesn't last for very long. How do you think about some of these very big spiky issues knowing that also that from a pure health point of view, maybe a scientific point of view, it's really, really important we get this stuff right?
Marnie Boyer
It is. And I think what we're doing now and we're evolving our product is to take feedback. So I actually did this sort of experiment with myself where I ate way too many bagels for breakfast. They're quick, they're easy, they're filling, right. And then I kind of said, "Okay, maybe I should try some avocado toast," which is what we typically eat here, and maybe some eggs on it. And let me just see at what point in the day do I get hungry instead of maybe 10:30 A.M. right after I've basically eaten my breakfast and digested it and my blood sugar is spiked and gone back down, what does that feel like if I just ate a real hearty breakfast? And the feedback that I told myself was, "Oh, I actually can make it all the way to lunch." So what we're doing is we're incorporating that sort of feedback mechanism into my MyFitnessPal that would allow you to say, "How do you feel? How's your energy today?"
And it would allow you to reflect back on, "Oh, okay, you had X meals yesterday, keep it up." Or, "Oh, you're feeling a little tired, maybe add some protein." So we're experimenting with ways to coach and use that internal feedback. We can also connect different devices like we were talking about earlier, like, your Apple watch, how did you sleep? It tells you how many hours you slept and the different types of sleep you've been in. So if you kind of connect all these different pieces of your wellness, MyFitnessPal and truly, food, not really MyFitnessPal, but food is the central.
It's really hard to exercise off weight or exercise off pain or gastrointestinal issues. You really need to treat that with food. And we've had, actually, someone reached out to me not too long ago, they had hit, I think it was 5,000 days on MyFitnessPal. I don't even know how many years that is. And he said he got started using it when he had a part of his lower intestine removed and he was getting a lot of irritability in his stomach and he used it to track how do I feel after I eat this versus this, so he couldn't remember what he ate each day, so he put it in my pal and now 5,000 days later, he's still doing it. So that's the kind of cool thing is that we're using that feedback mechanism to train your body rather than trying to use any sort of theories. It's really very personal in everybody's body can kind of react differently to different mixes of foods.
Mark Jones
So there's a really strong customer or user empowerment theme that I'm picking up there. So can you give us a quick overview of your marketing strategy? What are you taking to market?
Marnie Boyer
Well, our biggest marketing strategy right now is really through a large ecosystem of influencers through social media. We do find, like I mentioned earlier, that people are finding information about nutrition through social media. So we want to be there, and that's where they're looking and that's where they're spending a lot of time. So we're expanding through all those channels
And we're constantly testing and learning. So if you see one ad today and a different ad tomorrow, you're likely part of a different test strategy. We're trying to build organic presence.
We also really, really care about influencing influential people. So nutritionists, doctors, other people that you trust for your information. We really work on demonstrating our knowledge to people who also share knowledge. A lot of people get information about health from their doctors, and I would say a lot of doctors recommend MyFitnessPal because it's something, again, that we've been around for so long. So we're talking to them.
And then finally, we also really want to find pools of buyers. There's many, many companies that reach out to us every day. And sorting through the different opportunities, there's lots of really, really engaged customers using different apps for their wellness that we could tap into. And so there's been a lot of push on the partnership side as well.
Mark Jones
And what about above the line advertising? Are you on buses and billboards and those sorts of things, or is that not as big a drive from a brand awareness point of view?
Marnie Boyer
Usually, we kind of reserve that for some of our bigger campaigns. We have a really exciting campaign coming out in the new year that will feature probably more of that out of home and brand advertising. What we're finding is that we can reach a unique population going to YouTube and Facebook and Instagram, and we're maybe at a lower cost and, frankly, a commitment than what the television stations require.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Marnie Boyer
And so I have a lot of experience using billboards and things like that, especially in my Grubhub days, because that is such a moment where you're like, "I'm hungry right now and I'm on the subway going home." I think for fitness, you're probably more likely to be kind of in your couch or on your phone. So I think you have to be where consumers are, and so we may not always be on billboards as a result.
Mark Jones
That's a great insight. Well, tell me then how you see the influencer market playing out. Particularly as we see TikTok being a bit up and down really, quite frankly.
Marnie Boyer
Yes. I would say if I had to put a percentage, we do spend more on the smaller influencers. And part of the reason is going back to what we talked about, we have to serve so many needs. We have moms with young kids, mom with older kids planning their meals. And even though they're maybe less picky, there's more thought that has to go into picking a family meal over maybe some chicken nuggets for the kids and a nice dinner for mom and dad. We also talk to kids who are maybe just learning for the very first time how to use nutrition and how to cook. Maybe they didn't learn that growing up in school. We also want to help different cultures, like you mentioned, and share with them the ways that we can incorporate fitness and health into their lives. So we find that by having small influencers, you get more of them and you can tell a bigger story and connect with more consumers that way.
Mark Jones
Just as we start to wrap up, I'm interested, how would you describe the lessons that you've learned as a CMO? Just imagine you're at a barbecue with some friends and they say, "What are you learning at your job?" What are those top level insights, the things that really fascinate you about your work and maybe how this role is different to others in the past?
Marnie Boyer
Yeah, it's very cool. It's really been a challenge and a really fun one. I think that I stepped into this role right around the time a lot of AI things were happening. And so one of the things that I've always found myself is a super curious person. I actually have built apps. And I've tried the TikTok video maker and made weird videos that I would never show anyone. But just knowing, just having this curiosity I've really found that being adaptable in this time is really, really helpful to embrace, but also to show your team like, "Hey, I'm willing to embrace this." If someone from my team says, "Oh, I wrote this all using ChatGPT," I'd say, "Oh, that's great. I'm glad you saved your time." And we write... It just hurries us up and gets us past some of the harder things in the day.
I also know that as a leader, I have to set very clear expectations. And because there's so much going on, if I tell them one day this and one day that, and they're never going to know what I'm talking about. So just being really clear about my objectives, my priorities. It's hard to stay on task, but that is important to people.
And then making a tough call. If there's a lot of great ideas in the room or some really bad ideas, sometimes you just have to use what you know and use some of the intuition you have to say, "We're just not doing that." And sometimes that means you have incomplete information. And sometimes that means you have just way too much information to sift through and you just have to make a call and move on. And I think those are the things I've learned as the leader is that I have to do that now. That isn't being done for me. No one's telling me what to do. And as a result, I kind of have to own that setting of priorities and clearing everybody's table and telling them what is important to me.
Mark Jones
Are there influences from a leadership point of view that you look to, people that have been either mentors or that you look to as inspirational sources of your own at that CMO leadership level?
Marnie Boyer
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have two types of influencers in my life, people I want to be like and people I never, ever, ever, ever want to be anything like. And so I kind of hold those like the devil and the angel on my shoulder of...
So, I mean, I won't name any names, but someone who doesn't tell you how you're doing or doesn't give you the full truth, that's a devil. I am all about transparency. And I've had a lot of leaders who make me feel sad maybe the day they tell me how they might've felt, but really glad in the long run that they did.
And then on the other hand, I know that leaders can be empathetic and that they can share with you some vulnerabilities, but also be strong when you need them. And so I try to do a little of that. I'm a human, especially with all this working from home, you saw the dogs and the kids and you hear all these stories and it's hard to resist. Just really getting to know people, even though that's a very remote world. Just making sure you're there for them and hearing them out and giving them the chance to be their very best.
Mark Jones
Well Marnie, thank you for being my guest on the CMO Show, all the best in your role there at MyFitnessPal. And stay in touch. We'll speak to you soon.
Marnie Boyer
Thank you so much for having me.
Mark Jones
Look, it was quite fun to be able to say there's an app for that. I haven't said that in a long time. And it was a conversation that reminded me about the mindset we have in marketing. It used to be that apps were the solution. Of course, now we look at AI integrated with apps and then how we tell a story based on this interaction between the two. Or perhaps in your case, it's online services and products and the way that we think about our digital strategy and transformation.
This is an example of an organisation that still has customers very much at the core of who they are and what they do and I hope that you took out some lessons. A really great marketing team by the sound of it, who are thinking about constantly using data to improve.
So that's it for this episode of the CMO Show. Thanks once again for joining me and the team. We are a podcast produced by Impact Institute in partnership with Adobe. We are celebrating our 10-year anniversary, so thanks for being with us on this journey. We'll look forward to seeing you soon.