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Mixed Signals: How to Find the Consumer Opportunity in Health & Wellness
By Jayne Eastman, Managing Director,
Henry Rak Consulting Partners

If you are in the food or beverage business today, you are in the health & wellness business. Are you selling a fun treat, an out of home meal, a family dinner? You need to examine what role you will be playing in today's world, where our evolving consumer population increasingly and inexorably looks for incremental benefits around health and wellness. Are you creating a new health and wellness product? You'll need to know how many consumers will be interested enough in your new product to change their behavior, and with what frequency. Are you already selling health and wellness products? Then you'll need to be certain they are positioned in ways that protect and grow your position or you'll be out-maneuvered by aggressive competition.

Clearly, marketers have seen great opportunity in the country's - in fact, the world's - growing interest in health and wellness. Whole Foods is a marketing phenomenon. Dark chocolate is suddenly the baby boomer's treat of choice, largely due to its heart-health benefits. And although different diets come and go, total sales of diet books and diet aids continue to rise to stratospheric levels.

But at the same time, the ground is littered with high profile efforts that have, to be kind, underperformed. McDonald's salads, Aquafina Essentials, and Atkins bars are only a few.

The issue is not identifying the trend. It's finding the business opportunity. We all know that what people say and what people do can be vastly different, but perhaps is this nowhere more apparent than in the areas of health and wellness.

• Example: 127 million adults in the U.S. are overweight, but salad meals are down and fast food sales are rising.
• Example: About 2/3rds of Americans know that exercise is important for good health, but according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services only 12% of us get the minimum recommended amount of exercise and 25% get practically no exercise at all
• Example: well over 70% are concerned about fat, sugar and salt in their diet and claim they try to eat more lean meats, fruits, and vegetables, but only 6% have quality diets according to the USDA.

What's a marketer to do? How can we efficiently find new territory for innovation in health and wellness - even as the ground changes under our feet - and own that ground for our specific Brand and products?

The key is to understand that while health and wellness is a generic trend in the sense that it is so pervasive, consumers are not seeking and will not respond to generic solutions. They are looking for specific solutions that fit within the overall context of their lives…generally things that will make their lives better but not change their consumption patterns drastically. The mistake many marketers make is to either look too narrowly at just their food or beverage category or to segment consumers based on their attitudes alone. In both cases, what they are missing is context. The key for the marketer is to understand different consumer patterns in their entirety. This is fundamentally the difference between approaching the issue tactically as opposed to strategically.

For example, we know a number of consumers, concerned about managing calorie and fat intake, skip breakfast and drink only coffee. How does this play out in their subsequent snacking and lunch behavior? Do they look for low cal, low fat foods? Or are they so hungry that satiation is the highest priority? Some consumers look for healthier eating through organic and natural foods; but, for all but a minority of these people, organic and natural foods are only a small part of their overall food and beverage usage. Where is organic an effective alternative for them and where is it not - and why? What else do they eat and drink, and why?

Marketing strategy must create a bridge between what consumers say they want and how they actually behave. The best approach to building this bridge involves breaking consumers down into discrete behavioral groups to identify specific behavioral patterns in the arena of health and wellness. A precise articulation of existing behavioral patterns is critical because it reveals 4 key factors: (1) the variety of benefits different types of consumers are seeking; (2) how many consumers seek each benefit; (3) the degree of consumer commitment or loyalty to each behavior; and (4) the necessary product attributes that signal the benefit to them. A clear understanding of this forms one end of the bridge, and we are then in a position to use their attitudes to build the bridge to a new behavior which will better fit their needs. We know who uses what foods and beverages - health and wellness as well as the balance of the consumers' behavior; the context in which they use them; what needs they are experiencing; and how to build a product that appeals to them. This gives us tremendous insight into what we will need to provide them, how easy or difficult it will be to change them to a new behavior, and how to size the opportunity. This is the perspective required to create a strategy that transforms consumers' general desire for more health and wellness into a specific, profitable Brand opportunity.

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