09.26.2007

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NOW AVAILABLE» Wellness Lifestyle Insights 2007 EMERGING TRENDS TO SHAPE THE FUTURE MARKETPLACE Wellness Lifestyle Insights 2007 is one of the most comprehensive integrated quantitative and qualitative studies available to explore and explain the shifts occurring in consumers' attitudes and behaviors with regard to wellness in order to achieve a better "quality of life. Click to learn more and to order...

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Wellness Trend Update

The Good Life

For the better part of a decade, The Hartman Group has been documenting how shifts in consumer interest and involvement in health and wellness not only redefines consumer lifestyles, but has transformed the marketplace along the way. By 2000, we identified the irreversible tectonic shift in power from commerce to consumer, providing conclusive evidence that wellness consumers would have a profound impact and forever change the nature of consumption in the contemporary marketplace. Since then, our ongoing research continues to solidify the key notion that the wellness trend is not about merely selling health and wellness products; instead it is about something again as large as wellness itself: the consumers' pursuit of a better quality of life.

Our most recent study, Wellness Lifestyle Insights 2007: Emerging Trends to Shape the Marketplace, finds that while consumer language around wellness definitions has changed subtly over the years, wellness has become a broader cultural, more encompassing concept for consumers. In the past, control, condition management and illness prevention were at the forefront of consumer health and wellness thinking. In 2007, we find consumer wellness motives evolving into the desire for "quality life experiences."

This isn't to say condition management and illness prevention are not still important because they are, it is that one of the most compelling observations about today's consumers' underlying motivations for reclaiming control over their health and wellness is their aspiration to achieve something we call "the good life." Less an end goal in itself, we have started to see illness management and prevention as a means to a greater and more appealing end - quality life.

In the traditional sense, "the good life" is generally associated with aging consumers and retirement: having enough money, being financially sound, to have it "all" and be free from worry in the golden years. For many consumers, however, "the good life" was something only a select few, the "well off," could ever hope to attain. Through our Wellness Lifestyle Insights 2007 study, we now see that "the good life" has transitioned away from solely monetary implications to include more holistic views of health and wellness that almost all consumers can embrace. Quite simply, consumers want to be healthy so they can enjoy life today and tomorrow - freedom from illness, once a strong wellness motivator, is now a necessary and expected condition of modern life.

Wellness is the "Hub"

If you think you know health and wellness consumers by looking in the mirror you'd be wrong. We can't think of all wellness consumers as being like ourselves. Interestingly, industry and social institutions, like medical and public health organizations, rarely perceive consumers as consumers perceive themselves.

What wellness looks like varies as a consumer's involvement in the World of Wellness evolves and deepens. Wellness includes a wider variety of practices and becomes more holistic as consumers evolve from the Periphery (consumers maintaining only minimal, infrequent and less intense involvement) to the Core (consumers most active and intensely involved). When attempting to define "health and wellness" from the consumer perspective it may be helpful to think of wellness as a hub and its many varied meanings as spokes. The consumer's understanding of wellness today is much more holistic, encompassing a number of basic substantive categories (i.e., spokes) that convey important aspects of wellness: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, balance, simplicity, fitness, social/community and environmental.

The mental, emotional and spiritual arenas of wellness are typically adopted after the physical. Consumers may engage in many of the same activities and use the same products that they chose to support physical wellness, but the benefits sought sometimes expand. For instance, bike riding may begin as a good way to improve cardiovascular health, but it evolves into a means of managing emotional stress as well.

As consumers become more holistic (i.e., physical, emotional, mental, spiritual) in managing their personal health and wellness and that of their family members, their focus becomes broader. A consumer's preoccupation with personal wellness includes an interest in wellness of one's community. Consumers who make this transition come to believe that their personal wellness is contingent on living in communities that are economically and socially healthy. In order to feel truly well, it is important to these consumers to support their communities by shopping locally and volunteering to help others.

The World of Wellness continues to evolve and so do the consumers within it. In previous years, the spokes routing through the wellness hub were desires to remedy a specific health condition or concern and in 2005 the spokes were further refined toward very general motivations:

• "I want to stay healthy"
• "I want to prevent future illness" and
• "I want to feel better"

In 2007, with the overarching reason consumers engage in wellness activities is to attain "the good life," we note broad shifts in our culture that account for consumers' changing and evolving orientations to wellness. In the following table, we contrast and compare wellness according to the Traditional Culture of the past and our present day Consumer Culture.

Cultural Evolution and Wellness

Source: Wellness Lifestyle Insights 2007: Emerging Trends to Shape the Future Marketplace. The Hartman Group, Inc., 2007.

As stated previously, attaining the good life was once an aspirational goal thought of largely in financial terms. Consumers now think of quality life experiences as being fully engaged in life, having fun, enjoying authentic experiences, not living with restriction or denial, and permitting play and imagination. From this perspective, consumers are now articulating a deeper underlying motivation to be involved in wellness. For those consumers who subscribe to this outlook on wellness, without all these new "spokes" flowing through the wellness hub, you don't have health and well-being - you don't have "the good life."

Beyond the Good Life

Wellness will continue to evolve along the trajectory of quality. Quality experiences will continue to be redefined and the very concept of wellness may even be overtaken at some point by something of higher order importance such as "fulfillment." Just as health has become a necessary or required condition for wellness, wellness may become the necessary condition for fulfillment. Soon the term "health" may no longer resonate with consumers because it may become an implication of wellness. Eventually the term "wellness" may also become irrelevant as it will be implied when consumers seek fulfillment from quality experiences. We anticipate then, that in their quest for something beyond wellness, consumers may become driven by "the good life."

Stay tuned next week for our HartBeat Videocast on 4 trends in wellness...

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