How Fit Is Your Marketing Strategy? How Wellness Messaging Can Make Your Brand Stronger

Wellness feels like a very contemporary buzzword because it’s so prominent in our current culture. Everywhere you turn, it feels like there’s a new piece of advice on the best way to eat, work out, tend to your skin or stay looking and feeling young for longer. 

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It’s only natural. For as long as human beings have been trying to stay healthy, connected and safe, they’ve been talking about wellness. 

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But our scientific understanding of both best practices for wellness and how best to approach wellness marketing and wellness public relations have evolved radically over time. That means the ways brands communicate their value and differentiate themselves from competitors have changed a lot too. So how can brands stay fresh? It all starts with wellness messaging.

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What Is Wellness Messaging?

The term “wellness” might bring to mind your last spa trip or spandex-clad influencers offering diet and workout advice on your favorite social media platform. But contemporary wellness culture as we know it has been evolving since the mid-20th century. 

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“Wellness” was first defined as an intentional and persistent practice of self-improvement by Dr. Halbert L. Dunn in 1959. That was just a few years before the Bay Area counterculture that

exploded in the 1960s laid the foundation for today’s $5.6 trillion global wellness industry. 

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By 1979, the term had become mainstream enough that journalist Dan Rather covered it on 60 Minutes. One year later, Whole Foods was founded in Austin, Texas. When Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, the company was valued at $13.7 billion.

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It’s hard to ignore the power of valuations like that exploding over just a forty year span. And it’s no surprise that wellness is not only an industry in its own right but the intersection for many other sectors hoping to capitalize on consumers’ boundless desire to optimize their lives. From travel, tourism and tech to beauty, beverages and babycare to food, fashion and fitness, more industries than ever are incorporating wellness messaging into their branding, marketing and PR. 

Health and Wellness Marketing and Natural Products

Natural product brands in particular have found synergy with wellness messaging. “Natural products” is a broad, loosely defined category of goods derived from naturally occurring ingredients rather than synthetics, with an emphasis on environmentally friendly inputs and manufacturing processes, minimal industrial processing and safety for consumers with allergies and other health sensitivities. 

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Even emerging industries like legal cannabis and psychedelics have found success in marketing messaging and wellness PR tactics that (re)define these plants not as “drugs” but as natural products that fit seamlessly into wellness-focused lifestyles. 

How to Leverage Wellness Brand Messaging

So what do brands in any industry need to know about health and wellness marketing? These are a few things you want to keep in mind as you dial in on your brand’s white space and set your annual marketing plan.

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The foundation of all brand messaging is a deep understanding of your target audience’s pain points, hopes and dreams. Wellness messaging is so powerful and effective because it speaks to some of our deepest human desires—to be safe and healthy, to care and be cared for. 

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If you can authentically—and meaningfully—connect your brand and products to those fundamental human needs, you’ll have done a great deal of work toward earning your audience’s loyalty, identification and unwavering support. 

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Whether you’re building a brand from scratch or trying to plan how best to incorporate wellness as part of your brand’s evolution, here’s where to start: Go back to the essential messaging questions every brand must work through, and see what throughlines link your business to wellness considerations. For example:

• What differentiates your brand from your competitors? We offer cold-pressed essential oils because this extraction method means our products are less processed and retain more of their natural terpenes. 

• Who is your target audience? We realized that many athleisure brands don’t have inclusive sizing. Our target audience are mid to plus-size fitness enthusiasts who want and need affordable, cute, functional workout wear. 

• What are the origins of the brand? We founded this brand after watching a loved one struggle with chronic pain during an extended illness. They finally found relief in medical cannabis, and we began to explore how we could offer them the peak quality possible. We founded this brand to offer the same quality of care we want for our own family.

• What are your functional brand equities? Many outdoor clothing brands offer women’s pants only in a low-rise cut. We designed higher waistline styles that are more comfortable and provide a more secure fit for active women engaged in activities with a high range of motion like rock climbing, snowboarding and hiking.

• What are your emotional brand equities? We understand that parents put a lot of trust in the companies that formulate food for babies and toddlers. We put our products through additional third-party testing for heavy metals and pesticides so we can live up to your high expectations and offer you peace of mind.

• What keeps your customers up at night? They have a lot on their plate. They’re trying to juggle work, parenting and self-care while also maintaining an active social life and caring for aging parents. They need a boost that won’t make you as anxious as caffeine or energy drinks. We developed these functional mushroom chocolates to help our customers stay sharp and focused even when things get hectic.

Keep It Authentic to Avoid Greenwashing, Health-and-Safety Washing, Pinkwashing and Rainbow Washing

As you’re asking yourself these targeted questions about your mission, vision and values, your benefits to the customer and the reasons they have to believe in your brand, you have to be radically honest. Wellness-minded customers—particularly those seeking natural products—are known for reading the label, both literally to scrutinize ingredients and metaphorically to scrutinize brands’ messaging.

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Greenwashing—defined by Merriam-Webster as “the act or practice of making a product, policy, activity, etc. appear to be more environmentally friendly or less environmentally damaging than it really is”—has been a persistent tactic in marketing ever since the environmental movement gained momentum in the 1960s. 

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Of course, that’s not the only sort of messaging sleight of hand that marketers have been known to pull. Health-and-safety washing, pinkwashing and rainbow washing are all terms that refer to similar attempts to position a brand as healthier, safer or more supportive of women or the LGBTQIA+ community than they really are. 

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Consider, for example, when a slew of brands backed off Pride messaging after backlash against Bud Light, Starbucks and Target. Similarly, conversations about “blackwashing” took off as many corporations quietly shuttered the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs and messaging they publicly embraced in the months and years after the George Floyd protests.

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Media-savvy consumers are increasingly adept at discerning when companies are walking the walk on environmental, health or allyship claims, not to mention health claims and other deceptive messaging. Not only that, a growing majority of consumers prefer spending their money with purpose-driven brands—a whopping 83% of younger millennials and Gen Z. 

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Brands that pay lip service to their customers’ most dearly held values without substance run the risk of squandering public goodwill. It’s better to invest in genuine health, wellness and environmental messaging that speaks to the real benefits of your brand and products than in crisis communications. Maybe it’s just our agency’s journalism-minded principles, but integrity is invaluable. 

Balancing Consumer Education and Entertainment

Of course, not every instance of “washing” is inherently malicious or duplicitous. One of the biggest challenges in health and wellness marketing is that short attention spans, average consumer literacy and competitive ad space can make it hard to provide factual information engagingly.

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Long-form, evidence-based research can sometimes be deemed too dense, boring or even biased compared to more digestible formats like social media posts, podcasts and video content. Meanwhile, marketing tactics often work best on a subconscious, integrative level. So what’s the happy medium? 

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You might want to base your wellness marketing and PR strategy on persuading your audience to intellectually engage with complex scientific materials—that’s how you build your brand’s expertise, authority and trust (EAT), right? Your audience, however, might prefer to learn by watching an influencer with a flawless complexion demonstrate a new face serum or a personal trainer with six-pack abs show the correct form for an oblique crunch. 

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The best health and wellness marketing campaigns find a way to communicate efficacy in a way that balances consumer education with entertainment. That’s particularly true in sectors like beauty, personal care and food, which people like to engage with in their downtime and as a way to relax or socialize. 

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Engaging with a skincare TikTok or foodie Instagram is a much different vibe than shopping for the best medication or supplement to treat a health condition or for the right household maintenance product. Some folks find that kind of comparison shopping recreational and relaxing, it’s true. But the vast majority of your total addressable audience isn’t poring through medical and chemistry journals for funsies, no matter how much YouTube stars encourage “doing your own research.” 

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To leverage health and wellness messaging, it’s important to create consumer education that’s authentic, accurate and appealing. This is something that many cannabis brands and psychedelic brands do very well. The secret to their success is that marketers always keep consumers’ primary goals in mind. 

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The science of cannabis terpenes, for example, might feel a little esoteric unless you are trying to decide between a CBD cream with terpenes and one without because you’re tired of dealing with tennis elbow. Your audience may very well be happy to read a well-written blog explaining the entourage effect if it can help them meet two goals: picking a product and easing physical discomfort. 

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We’ve all heard the adage that knowledge is power, but it’s important to remember that means knowledge is also empowering. Your brand can be the one that empowers its audience by giving them trustworthy, accurate information in a format they find enjoyable and useful.

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Last but not least, don’t be afraid to think deeply about your brand voice or to use audience segmentation to refine your messaging. Above all, make like a toddler and ask “why” over and over again—the answer to that question is the key to building a powerful brand. If your brand’s “why” aligns with that of your customers, nothing can stand in your way. 

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‍We’re always ready to talk through your brand’s unique needs and pain points to find a custom solution. But if you aren’t ready to start that conversation yet, learn more about how Grasslands transforms brands like yours with our proven process.