Wellness Lifestyle Insights: Evolution of Consumer Trends in Health and Wellness

The majority of consumers (85%) take an interest in their health and wellness. An interest that is largely driven by wanting to stay healthy, wanting to prevent future illness and wanting to feel better.

This report takes an in-depth look at how these wellness consumers' lifestyles, shopping habits, and product usage have changed over the past five years and what that trajectory foreshadows about the future. Starting with a baseline of research published in our 2000 Wellness Lifestyle Shopper Study, we incorporated national quantitative and qualitative research in early 2005 to produce a longitudinal look at how wellness consumers live, shop and buy.

LIVE

The report begins by analyzing the changing factors that drive wellness, including what wellness means to consumers, then and now, how consumer knowledge has evolved over time, and how changes in consumer attitudes are manifesting themselves in the types of wellness activities consumers engage in.

For example, consumers today are more concerned about the level of consumption of sugar than about consumption of fat. They are also more concerned about protein intake than in years past.

SHOP

This study also uncovered how consumers have changed the way they shop for wellness products. Alternative channels to the grocery channel have made significant inroads in the share of wellness product purchases. This section charts how consumers have migrated to various channels from the grocery channel between 2000 and 2005.

Also, we've analyzed consumers' spending by wellness segment: Core, Mid-Level, and Periphery. Not surprisingly, the Mid-Level represents the greatest market size, as measured by dollars spent, making up 63% of wellness product expenditures.

USE

In this chapter, we analyze which products and services consumers incorporate into their wellness lifestyle. What consumers consider important to wellness and what they actually use are not always in sync.

For example, over-the-counter (OTC) medications are purchased by more consumers (49%) than rate them as important to their wellness (26%).

This analysis includes various categories including foods, beverages, supplements, medications, and alternative healthcare modalities.

Finally, using neurolinguistic mapping and in-depth interviews, the report presents how consumers decipher the myriad of words and information found on package labels when evaluating today's products and brands. We present a hierarchy of labeling components based on their relative importance to consumers. We also analyze how each component affects purchase decisions within each wellness segment.