Today’s Wellness Lifestyle: Negotiating Extremes Brings Balance

Almost a decade ago, The Hartman Group started to focus specifically on understanding why consumers get involved in health and wellness lifestyles, noticing a profound underlying reason as to why consumers might self-diagnose their own allergies, take vitamins and herbal tinctures, shop for organics and painstakingly try to decipher the nutrition facts panel on packages of food. Among diverse behaviors falling under the heading of wellness, Americans were increasingly looking to “take back” elements of control over their personal health and that of their families. In later research, we began to form profiles of consumers, based on a position within a “World of Wellness” and found those on the periphery (consumers least involved in wellness lifestyles) defined wellness, from a physical standpoint, as “eating healthy, exercising regularly and not being sick.” At the other end of the spectrum, the most active “core” consumers in wellness, when examined as recently as 2005, defined the term by integrating mental, physical and emotional aspects of wellness into their daily lives.

Recently, Hartman Group completed further analysis of consumer wellness lifestyles and found consumer language around wellness definitions has changed subtly, but profoundly, over the years. Today, we find the term “wellness” is a broader, more encompassing concept for consumers.

First, consumers at all levels of involvement in wellness lifestyles have expanded their understanding of wellness as a concept. For example, Periphery Wellness Consumers now define “wellness” beyond physical horizons and acknowledge “being well” includes emotional, mental and spiritual components. While mainly aspiring to these concepts, even among the least involved wellness consumers, there is a clear recognition that there is more to wellness than just physical health.

Second, there is an overarching desire among all consumers to pursue wellness to achieve “quality life experiences”. Whereas, until recently, wellness had been defined from the standpoint of managing and preventing illnesses and various disease states, consumers are reclaiming control over their health and wellness. The search for quality life experiences includes being fully engaged in life, having fun, enjoying authentic moments, not living with restriction or denial, and permitting play and imagination.

Next, there are four prominent trends traversing the World of Wellness, which find consumers resonating with notions of balance, slow, quality and sustainability. Specifically, in their quest for quality life experiences, consumers are seeking balance through negotiating extremes, rather than through moderation. In an effort to have more balance, consumers are slowing down to offset the increasingly harried pace of contemporary life. The trend toward slow life is evident, as consumers place greater value on rest, relaxation, time away from technology, travel and foods that have been grown and prepared in an unhurried fashion. Quality is continually redefined by consumers as they engage in wellness to achieve life experiences on a higher plane. In years past, the terms fresh and organic signified superiority; today, local, live and raw are quality distinctions as well.

The newest dimension is sustainability, which, while still not a household word, is gaining traction in the World of Wellness. This is especially true for consumers approaching the core of wellness where sustainability refers to preserving a way of life in local communities as well as the environment.

For many consumers, a common, overarching reason for participating in wellness is to achieve quality life experiences both in the present and in the future. Interestingly, a primary strategy for achieving this goal is through balance. While balance in the context of wellness is nothing new in terms of earlier consumer definitions (e.g., “I’m trying to lead a balanced lifestyle”), in years past consumers spoke at length about such balance as achieved through moderation. Moderation, in this case, was framed in aspects of denial, and meant a general rejection of full experiences, where individuals might only permit themselves small amounts of all things good and all things bad. Today, in the context of wellness, consumers speak of balance as “negotiating extremes.” Balance now means allowing oneself to fully experience the good and the bad, but ensuring the pendulum does not get stuck at either polar extreme. For example, rather than having a low-fat chocolate cookie as a moderate indulgence, consumers now prefer to have a completely decadent chocolate cookie from their favorite local bakery.

On the other side of the pendulum swing, the same consumer will eat five servings of organic fruits and vegetables two to three times per week rather than making moderate attempts to watch what they eat. Such attempts to balance extremes are not just limited to food behavior: Consumers are negotiating extremes in all arenas of life that have impacts on physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and social and environmental wellness. Thus spending time with others is balanced by spending time alone, spending time exercising is balanced by mental stimulation and so on. When describing this new sense of balance, consumers still use the word moderation, but say: “All things in moderation, including moderation!”

Much of today’s marketing in the wellness space, whether food, supplements or a diverse range of products, typically focuses on the specific benefits that a product delivers toward a perceived and targeted need, e.g., “low cholesterol” or “heart healthy”. Such marketing, based on broad-scope health claims, is beginning to show signs of wear, since these product attributes are primarily functional and cater to what have become mainly Periphery Consumer definitions of wellness: “eating healthy, getting exercise, not getting sick”.

Today’s wellness consumer sees the world with a broadened, more holistic vision that seeks quality consumption experiences from all aspects of life, including what were formerly framed as fairly mundane product purchases and shopping experiences. Thus, instead of emphasizing a product’s functionality, such as how a product meets a perceived need in terms of preventing a health condition, we are entering a new era where consumers seek to understand the elements of the product or service that signal quality, and how these elements fit with their attempts to balance life at the extremes. Methods of signaling quality might include communicating the uniqueness of ingredients—“steel cut, organic, whole grain oats” instead of “rolled oats”—or even more persuasively, telling a story of quality production in a meaningful narrative that resonate to occasions for use.

In terms of marketing to the quest for a balanced lifestyle, marketers in the days ahead will need to understand the occasions and experiences that consumers equate with using such products: The “golden moment” when a consumer enjoys the truly decadent chocolate cookie mentioned earlier is the quality experience to understand, just as is “the moment of truth,” when that new and great feeling pair of running shoes hits the street.

The functionality and ingredients of what make up these products are important, but to changing wellness consumers, the role of experience, in the context of balancing different extremes and using these products, is what will increasingly make a lasting impression. 

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