The wellness brand that talks to its audience as if they are broken and need fixing has misunderstood who its audience is. The wellness consumer is not broken. They are optimizing. The distinction changes everything about how to communicate with them.
The deficit framing problem
Most wellness brands communicate from a deficit framing. The product is positioned as the solution to a problem the consumer has. The problem is stress, or poor sleep, or low energy, or inadequate nutrition. The consumer is implicitly told that they are deficient and the product will fix the deficiency.
The deficit framing works in the short term. It creates urgency. It gives the consumer a reason to buy. The problem is that the consumer who has bought the product and resolved the deficit has no reason to continue buying. The relationship is transactional. The brand has sold a solution to a problem. When the problem is solved, the relationship ends.
What the audience actually wants
The wellness consumer who is spending consistently on wellness products is not spending to fix a deficit. They are spending to optimize a performance. The distinction is subtle but it changes the entire relationship. The consumer who is optimizing is never finished. There is always a higher level of performance to reach. The relationship with the brand that helps them optimize is ongoing rather than transactional.
The brands that have understood this tend to communicate from an optimization framing rather than a deficit framing. The product is not the solution to a problem. It is the tool for reaching the next level. The consumer who has used the tool to reach one level is interested in the next tool for the next level. The relationship compounds.
The community problem
The second thing wellness brands get wrong about their audience is the community. Most wellness brands build communities that are organized around the brand’s products rather than around the audience’s goals. The community that is organized around the brand’s products is a customer support forum with a wellness theme. The community that is organized around the audience’s goals is something the audience wants to be part of regardless of which brand they are using.
The brands that build communities organized around goals tend to find that the community produces more loyalty than the product does. The consumer who is part of a community that is helping them reach their goals has a reason to stay with the brand that is separate from the product’s performance. The community is the moat.
The credibility question
The wellness category has a credibility problem that most wellness brands are making worse rather than better. The claims that are made for wellness products are often not supported by the evidence that the audience is increasingly capable of evaluating. The consumer who has been burned by a wellness claim that turned out to be unsupported is more skeptical of the next claim, not less.
The brands that are building durable credibility in the wellness category tend to be the ones that are honest about what the evidence supports and what it does not. The brand that says “the evidence for this is strong” and “the evidence for this is preliminary” is building a different kind of trust than the brand that says everything is proven. The honest brand is harder to build in the short term. It is more durable in the long term.
Related from Impulsblog: Why recovery is the most underrated part of fitness
Related from Impulsblog: Why email still outperforms every other channel
