07.21.2010

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The most comprehensive consumer and shopper exploration of health and wellness motivations, behaviors and trends in the marketplace today.

Two reports tell the story of where wellness consumers and shoppers are at today, how they are evolving and what the future of wellness may look like.

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Road to Wellness: Cultural Traditions in 2010

With their significance likely lost among the thousands of SKU's packing today's supermarket shelves, many of us may not recall that the less-than-flashy Graham cracker is actually an historic relic of 19th century trends in health and wellness embodied by Reverend Sylvester Graham. Interestingly, although his influence dates back to well over 150 years ago when he invented his whole-wheat "Graham's Bread," as a 19th century advocate of dietary reform and vegetarianism, Reverend Graham might not find it all that odd to be alive today, demonstrating the remarkable historical journey consumer trends in wellness represent.

We say this observing today's ever-growing wellness marketplace, where, based on insights from our recent study, Reimagining Health + Wellness 2010, we see today’s consumers navigating wellness with greater breadth and depth of knowledge than ever before, embracing lifestyles that Reverend Graham would no doubt find fascinating. Consumers today articulate “wellness” as comprising one’s physical and internal state. The term “wellness” is increasingly being redefined to mean “quality of life.” This reframing of wellness has significant implications for the practice of health and wellness in 2010:

A BROADENED UNDERSTANDING: Consumers’ definitions of wellness encompasses the physical, emotional, emotional and spiritual

Core consumers have always been able to articulate wellness in sophisticated and holistic ways. In 2010, however, we find that even Periphery consumers, at least aspirationally, articulate quality of life.

A PERSONAL PRACTICE: Consumers believe that achieving quality of life is different for every individual, and are looking for wellness practices that uniquely fit their needs, lifestyles and goals

While emotional and spiritual wellness have always been accepted as highly subjective aspects of wellness, consumers are taking a “what works for me” approach to physical and mental wellness as well.

A PRACTICAL APPROACH: Consumers are seeking more flexible, simple ways of incorporating wellness into everyday life and view indulgence and pleasure as essential to well-being

Whereas Core Consumers were somewhat notorious for more disciplined adherence to wellness principles, the two are taking a more pragmatic, balanced approach to wellness.

Analysis on respondents’ collage homework reveals their view of wellness as the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.

This increasingly sophisticated consumer orientation to wellness, like a complex family genealogy, stems from deep roots that link to a relatively recent and renewed interest in health and wellness, which exploded over the past 40 years. This coupled with a long-term historic cultural beliefs about exercise, digestion, folk medicine, vegetarianism, and nutrition date back centuries. All of these factors, and more, combine to drive the flourishing health and wellness market we see today.

To shed light on historical trends in health and wellness and how they might relate to today's increasingly wellness-oriented consumer, we interviewed Dr. James C. Whorton, University of Washington professor emeritus of bioethics and humanities and a noted medicine and public health historian. Dr. Whorton has written extensively on the history of medicine and public health, the history of health beliefs and behaviors, disease in history, and on how alternative and complementary medicine, like naturopathy and homeopathy, arose. Dr. Whorton's books include Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (1982), Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society (2000) and Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America (2002).

HartBeat: What about the health reformers of the 19th century like Sylvester Graham and Dr. Kellogg? What if someone like Graham or Kellogg were alive today, would they find it all that strange? For example, we're inundated with health and wellness digestion infomercials, fitness machines, obesity is in the news. It seems that many of these topics just don't seem to go away.

Dr. Whorton: I think that for people who are writing about health or marketing products as health promoters, the subject matter and topics are largely the same—but, the difference I see historically is that the idea of wellness is something fairly recent, at least from an historian's perspective: Before the late-18th century, people were pretty much resigned to illness for much of their lives and in most cases an early death. The idea that you could greatly increase longevity and live vigorously into advanced years was something that was alien to the way people thought. It wasn't really until the Enlightenment and the 18th century emphasis on science and on the ability of human beings to take control and shape their lives and improve their condition that we saw a lot of attention given to wellness.

A big difference too, between then and Kellogg's day is that people tried to encourage society to achieve wellness and wellness was a goal in itself. But then in the 19th century it was seen as a tool for achieving larger goals and was largely seen as a way to bring about a more moral society. People like Sylvester Graham believed that a perfect Christian world would come out of everyone being healthy because being in control of physical appetites would help you control your urges. And then with Kellogg, it wasn't so much as creating a perfect Christian society as it is improving one’s economic situation.

HB: In the 1990s, we saw a significant upswing in consumer interest in alternative and complementary medicine, dietary supplements, and organics—all cues that from the industry side were typically viewed as “market segments.” Yet from our perspective we saw these cues as consumer-driven phenomena driven in part by underlying beliefs relating to a cultural history of folk remedies, self treating, and prevention—all undertaken by consumers so as to take control of their health. What is it about our culture that relates to these behaviors and product uses?

Dr. Whorton: Well, within the tradition of what's often called alternative and complementary medicine, there's always been an emphasis on using natural remedies, in the sense of both using things straight from nature without any laboratory alterations and also with the justification that these remedies work by supporting the body's recuperative mechanisms. I think that's expanded and I think you're right that there has been an explosion of interest that ties into this basic outlook on the world that has been building since the 1970s. There has been a growth in enthusiasm for these things, and it seems to me it began in the 1960s and 1970s at a fairly low level.

I think a number of things came together then, including the realization that we were screwing up the natural world. With Rachel Carson publishing Silent Spring, we realized we were fouling our nest and this fed a desire to try and preserve and get back to nature. At the same time with regard to the medical profession, consumers saw an over-orientation of seeing patients as having "Disease A" or "Disease B" and people were feeling that they weren't being taken seriously, whereas the alternative practitioners were promising to do that. So there was a growing excitement over holistic medicine that the medical profession eventually fell in with as well.

The alternative system had been arguing for natural medicines since the late 1700s, but they found an unreceptive public. Since then, the two sides have fed off of one another: The alternative practitioners argue that we need a greater appreciation of nature, natural substances and natural healing agents. This perspective opens the doors for various ethnic, folk healing traditions that are seen as being genuine in a way that medicine isn't, since such products aren't derived from a laboratory but from human experience. This resonates with the public, and they have latched onto these different healing approaches (natural foods, dietary supplements, and so forth).

HB: From our most recent health and wellness study, Reimagining Health & Wellness, we're seeing consumers use food to both prevent and treat a wide range of health conditions. Do you have any reflections, given your historical perspective on health and wellness, on current consumer preferences for what they view as fresh, whole, "real" food versus what they sometimes describe as "factory food"?

Dr. Whorton: For most of the history of medicine, various foods were seen as therapies. Physicians felt that there were conditions that could be benefitted by eating the right diet. This was a major part of medical thinking from the 1500s to the 1700s. Yet the recommendations that you read from that time didn't really have any scientific basis. It was intuition or conclusions based on a very small number of patients. But the idea existed that food could be as effective as drugs in treatment.

From the Enlightenment onward, as medicine became more committed to providing a solid scientific rationale for what it did, the reliance on food steadily weakened. This started to change in the 19th century, partly because the people who were critical of the drug orientation of medicine, such as Sylvester Graham, vegetarians and other food reformers of the period, saw food as a way to wean the public off of their reliance on drugs that were seen as injurious. So the reformers ended up promoting diets largely on the basis of intuition and on moral considerations. Vegetarianism originally was pushed for moral health rather than physical, but then the moral and the physical became intermixed and doctors began to look skeptically at it and say, "Well, they've got a moral agenda, and they don't have any evidence for this." So by marginalizing it, perhaps they threw out the baby with the bath water. The whole idea that food could have a preventive value only came about again until fairly recently. Now we've got the discipline of nutraceuticals with scientists researching the pharmaceutical value of various food components. With the public, it's become more of a case of people becoming more fed up with the artificial world, as you say some of them see it as "food produced in a factory," and there's a broader desire to return to nature, and restore the natural world. This seems to make them ready to grab hold of anything that is considered natural.

Health and Wellness 2010:

The ever-growing health and wellness marketplace of today is an area of great opportunity drawing on a long and complex cultural history: With all Americans involved in health and wellness by varying degrees, the opportunity to present relevant products, retail experience and other services is significant for today's healthcare providers, manufacturers and retailers.

The Hartman Group’s Reimagining Health + Wellness 2010 study finds that consumers are spending more than ever before on a wide array of health and wellness related products and services ranging from foods and beverages, supplements and drugs to health care services and holistic wellness services. Since 2005, spending rose almost 50 percent across a number of health and wellness categories from a monthly average $104 to $148.

In part because of our long cultural fascination with topics linking to health and wellness, today’s consumers are increasingly savvy in their wellness journeys. Consequently, products and services should be tailored to the wellness orientation of consumers that a health and wellness brand, product or service is trying to reach. Within food retail, remember that although fresh, real and clean translate to healthfulness, contemporary consumers balance health concerns with pleasure. As evidence, we witness today eating occasions where the goals of savoring sumptuous food and supporting personal health are completely compatible.

For more on Reimagining Health & Wellness click here >>

Comment »

Over half of all consumers (54%) say they have recently changed their views on health & wellness.

In 2010, interest in Vitamin D has exploded - 60% of consumers are adding more Vitamin D to their diets.

32% of all consumers have consumed functional drinks in the past 30 days.

Younger consumers cite stress (51%) & energy levels (47%) as triggers for changing their views on health & wellness.

The average household spends $148.48 per month on categories that have a wellness halo.

*All statistics taken from The Hartman Group's new study, Reimagining Health & Wellness 2010.

We've trekked through the annals of health and wellness to bring you vital dates & fascinating developments. From peanut butter & jelly (1901) to Viagra (1997) and beyond, we've got you covered. Join us as we explore 200 years of health and wellness!

Click to view

Like what you see?

The Road to Wellness infographic is now available as a limited-edition poster print!

$25. To order, please contact:

Blaine Becker
425.452.0818, ext 124
blaine@hartman-group.com