05.10.2002
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This issue of HartBeat is excerpted from a recent N|sight Magazine, The Hartman Group's bi-annual publication exploring the dynamics of the health and wellness arena. |
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SECTION ONE. Just what do we mean by, 'The new wellness consumer'?
Since joining the good fight here at The Hartman Group my mind has, on occasion, wandered to matters it has not visited since my college days. And researching the new wellness consumer especially finds me struggling to recall the lessons of those golden years.
One of the lessons I have tried hard to cast out is the notion that people are individuals. For a demographer like myself it is important not to understand individual behavior, because only aggregate behavior adequately explains what demographers study, namely, population dynamics. After awhile, however, you start to lose track of meaningful behavior, which only exists at the individual level (as I endeavor to explain below). Now, this is not really a problem if the folks you are analyzing behave in more or less predictable ways. Unfortunately, we cannot always rely on individuals to be so accommodating. A prime example, from demography, of what I mean is provided by the Baby Boom. We are all familiar with some of the effects that this unprecedented wave of humanity has had on life as we know it. Indeed, predicting how the boom and its ripples will alter the social landscape exemplifies all that is good and right in demography today. What demographers do not like to talk about is how the freakish event itself caught every single demographer and fellow traveler with their knickers down. Back at a time when birth rates were falling all around the world, the profession sat back and proclaimed the dawn of a new era of prosperity and population control. Then, boom!
So, every time I feel like I have my finger on the pulse of anything, I think about those red-faced demographers with the future of their generations hanging in the breeze and remind myself that the pulse of the American consumer would require a few hundred million fingers to record. Which leads me to ask, "Just what do we mean by, 'The new wellness consumer'?" Could there be only one?
The answer, of course, is no. In fact, we should feel at least some discomfort trying to define three, six, ten or even twenty new wellness consumers. That is because those consumers act as individuals. The Hartman Group has struggled mightily with defining the new wellness consumer. And while we have not exactly given up on the idea of segmenting consumers into a small number of manageable wellness types, I am still mindful of the fact that consumer typologies can obscure as much as they illuminate. To address these issues, The Hartman Group has developed a method, The Hartman Model, to identify wellness consumers according to our world perspective.
SECTION TWO. Changing the Rules: The New Wellness Consumer
Despite all this hedging, I believe it is still useful to think of wellness consumers according to abstract types, which brings me to another college lesson I almost unlearned: Types do not really exist. We just make them up to create the illusion of meaningful behavior. When I say "meaningful behavior," I mean behavior we understand only through consideration of individuals' motives. For behavior to be meaningful, it is not enough to know what consumers do. We also need to know why they do it. Consumer typologies help us clarify why some consumers do one thing while others do another, but they do not necessarily describe actual individuals. In fact, many consumers exhibit behaviors consistent with several different types even though most will conform closely to a single type.
As much as this sounds like inconsequential academic rhetoric, it has a lot to do with understanding wellness consumers. Remember the Baby Boom? Demographers failed to see it coming because they expected the laws of science to govern the rise and fall of populations rather than the motivated actions of individual people. If they had paid as much attention to why people had babies as to geometric progressions, they would have been in a better position to predict the timing of births and to have guessed at something like the Baby Boom, which, as we all know, followed in the wake of a worldwide war that (and this is the part that apparently caught demographers off guard) interrupted the normal course of human events.
Lest we market researchers likewise be caught off guard, we had better acknowledge the fact that the normal course of consumer behavior has been interrupted by the wellness movement. Conventional marketing wisdom, like demography B.B. (Before Boom), rests on a set of behavioral assumptions that only partially apply to conditions facing the new wellness consumer. Key to these conditions is the fact that the emerging wellness movement seeks to recast lifestyles as a kind of personal haven for those wrestling with the paradoxes of post-modern culture. In an effort to blend elements of modern culture with elements of traditional culture, consumers are crafting new personalized lifestyles that challenge our traditional marketing strategies. In short, the players are not just changing the rules of the old game they are seeking to change the game itself. I think this is what we mean when we talk about the new wellness consumer.
This consumer thinks nothing of engaging in behaviors the casual onlooker sees as mutually contradictory. At The Hartman Group we have grown accustomed to the fact that many wellness consumers who talk the talk, fail to walk the walk. For example, we always find individuals who claim to proactively do things to lower health risks while regularly smoking, or consumers too busy to worry about eating healthier but who go out of their way to buy organic produce. Well, these apparent behavioral and attitudinal inconsistencies cannot be understood by sticking with the rules of the old consumer game. And until the wellness movement gives rise to a new game, consumer behaviors and attitudes will continue to evade naive, albeit comfortable, explanation - yet another lesson I once learned.
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