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Health and Wellness Marketing That Cuts Through The Clutter

At Trajectory, we refer to the most fervent consumers who integrate health and wellness into their daily lives as the Active Health & Wellness Explorers. While their make-up spans demographic boundaries, they’re bound together by a state of mind and a take charge “self-care” approach to living life that’s becoming mainstream. For these people, health and wellness isn’t just what they practice, it’s who they are. And depending upon the research, they account for between 45-50% of American consumers. To rise above the noise and capture this robust growth opportunity, health and wellness marketing needs to respond to what these explorers want out of their lives.

Active Health & Wellness Explorers

For these active explorers, health is more than periodic preventative care, prescriptions and pills. Rather, it’s about everyday habits that help to create better states of health. And if your marketing isn’t addressing active explorers, you’re cutting short your opportunity to connect with your fastest growing, affluent and educated customers.

Paul Keckley, who writes about healthcare research and policy analysis and is the author of The Keckley Report, says that consumers are taking advantage of three trends driving the maturation of what he similarly refers to as the healthiness sector:

1. Clinical Legitimacy: The science of healthiness is advancing clinicians and researchers to explore how diet schemes, exercise regimens, emotional health and other factors impact healthiness.
2. Investor Support: The U.S. market for healthiness is growing at 6.4% per year – higher than overall health spending of 5.7% per year forecast through 2027 by the CBO.
3. Encouraging Federal Policies: The federal government is asserting’s its support for policies that advance healthiness as a foil to runaway costs from chronic diseases.

You can read more here in his blog post — Time To Take Our Health Seriously?.

Taking Charge With Self-Care

Active health and wellness explorers are practicing wellness through multiple pathways. For millennials and Gen X, their lifestyle habits include a combination of physical activity, bolstering spiritual and mental health and smarter/cleaner eating. And for boomers, it’s about making smarter choices about health, wellness and nutrition that will help them to live longer and fill those years with unlimited potential. Common across demographic segments is that self-care has become a part of their identities.

Implications For Health & Wellness Marketing

Brands across multiple (non-traditional health and wellness) sectors have an opportunity to establish rapport and build trust with active health and wellness explorers who represent a substantial revenue opportunity for their businesses. Here are four suggestions for connecting with these consumers.

Well-Being (Not Products) Front & Center

Active health and wellness explorers will choose your brand for the take charge life they want to live. A life that celebrates play, mindfulness, joy, aging, and more. This means your health and wellness marketing should reflect their values (through the prism of their physical, emotional and mental health) so that they can see themselves in your brand. And more importantly, view your brand – beyond its functional benefits – as helping them live the life they’ve imagined.

Partner For Health

By keeping abreast of the strategies consumers are using to stay fit and healthy – across all demographics – brands can do much more than simply advertise how active health and wellness explorers can meet their goals. Paid communication will only take a brand so far. The most successful brands are built not by advertising, but by actions. Think more broadly about how to become partners with active health and wellness explorers at every step of their health and wellness journey.

Successful brands in the health and wellness space (regardless of whether a traditional health and wellness brand or not) will do best by being a personal springboard to help people achieve who they want to become –  providing their audiences with aspirational content, the tools to feel better, play better and look better and easy access to results.

Rethink Your Digital Strategy

Nothing has threatened the very foundations of brands more than technology, which has fundamentally altered the relationship between consumers and brands by empowering consumers like never before. To survive and thrive, companies need to think in terms of becoming a trusted partner to influence behaviors…beyond passive one-way messaging.

As consumers struggle to allocate what little discretionary time they have between an increasing array of competing alternatives, devising digital strategies to earn attention and influence becomes paramount. The alternative is to be ignored, overlooked and then replaced. Digital marketing strategies, resources and tools that help us understand, access, track, manage, and engage with health and achieve holistic wellness will be in high demand for years to come.

Creating Loyalists And Co-Creators

Once you have someone passionate about your brand, you increase your chances of having an active fan who is more than willing to share your brand story (in a more believable fashion than doing it yourself). The more you help people to be their healthiest selves – the bigger the reward in consumers not only engaging with your brand, but with other consumers to co-create mutually beneficial meaning.

Every Brand Has An Opportunity

You may not think the audience for your brand is the active health and wellness explorer, one of the millions of people looking for a better way to live their lives. But this isn’t the case. Because health and wellness has extended into every aspect of our lives, and also every sector of the economy.

For health care marketers, it’s about prevention and restoring these explorers to keep them healthy and moving forward to achieve their lifestyle goals and dreams. For skin care and beauty marketers, it’s about authenticity, transparency, less is more and feeling safe about the products that go onto and into our bodies. And for brands from travel to food to retail to homewares, it’s becoming mindful that their product or service has a positive impact on their customers’ wellbeing, too. In our increasingly chaotic world, “wellness” will become an increasingly sought-after antidote.

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As specialists in healthcare and wellness, New Jersey marketing agency Trajectory knows these active health and wellness explorers and can help you to more meaningfully engage them across every step of their health journey through your marketing strategy. Reach out for a no-obligation consultation.