My guilty pleasure is Quora, which I dip into if a question intrigues me. Sometimes I “archive” the more interesting topics here.
“Is Fitbit the best fitness tracker, or is it just the best known brand?“
Fitbit was early to market with wearable trackers. Wearable pedometers had been around for a while but were mostly a niche product (even after the release of Manpo-Kei, a Japanese product with a punning name that is the origin of the “10,000 steps a day” recommendation). There was also a chest-strap-based Polar product, paired with a watch-style display, that was released in the 1980s – Polar is still a top heart-rate monitor brand. The availability of small accelerometers helped launch the wearable fitness tracker market in earnest, and Fitbit was the first to market a small wearable (a clip-on, if I recall correctly), dedicated to fitness tracking, using this technology (a couple of years after Nokia incorporated it into a phone and around the same time Apple incorporated it into a miniature iPod – also a clip-on device).
The combination of being so early to market, launching the product at a tech conference attended by an extremely interested demographic, and a savvy marketing approach, which included actively reaching out to corporate wellness programs, gave its devices both a ready group of enthusiasts and wide distribution. Add to that some notable PR nightmares – like users’ sexual activity being exposed in people’s online public profiles in 2011 and a US Senator, a few years later, calling Fitbit out by name for its casual approach to user privacy – and Fitbit definitely acquired a brand awareness that would be hard for any other tracker to match.
Arguably, the best fitness trackers are in the Garmin product line – the first Forerunner model was released some 4 years before the Fitbit was just a model circuit board in a wooden box. However, Garmin’s early focus was on portable GPS devices, and Garmins were long of interest only to niche groups like competitive athletes and other people interested in navigation support (sailors, pilots, multisport and remote outdoor athletes). Also, their devices were fairly large and expensive in the era when Fitbit was gaining traction. They were simply not aimed at the same groups of people. Now, of course, both companies have much larger product lines, with overlapping devices.