Social Data Reveals Health and Wellness Consumer Insights

Health and wellness is a $4.2 trillion industry.

That means your health isn’t just a lifestyle goal. It’s an economy.

With access to a whole new assortment of food choices, supplements, niche exercise options, mindfulness and mental health practices, health and wellness impacts all areas of our lives from daily routines to new experiences.

This evolution translates into dollars. Here’s how much consumers spent in one year:

• $702 billion on healthy eating, nutrition and weight loss
• $595 billion on fitness and mindfulness
• $639 billion on wellness tourism

It’s raining money up in here! That means brands and businesses can’t afford to leave out health and wellness consumers. So, what health and wellness consumer trends do you need to know? 

Our latest social listening report on health and wellness consumer trends features custom-built audience segments in the health and wellness sector. It includes exclusive analysis on who they are, what they want, how they feel, and what their buying habits are. 

Let’s dive into the need-to-know takeaways from the report:

Who Are the Healthy Lifestyle Consumers? 

We arrived at 4 key audience segments based upon our research of the market.

If you haven’t read the report, here they are:

• Casual Dieters
• Fitness Fanatics
• Whole  Wellness Body Gurus
• Organic Consumers

These audiences were created by scouring the universe of consumer created conversations online, analyzing specific topics discussed by that audience. For example, the Whole Body Guru consumer segment was built by analyzing the millions upon millions of people talking about meditation and self-care. The Casual Dieter persona was made by using people who talked about counting calories or talking about specific diet plans.

In all, tens of millions of consumer conversations were analyzed in creating these custom audience segments.

We used these four personas to frame our reporting and analyze who they are and why they are the way they are. You’ll see them featured in several key charts and graphs to show how they breakdown generationally, demographically and behaviorally. 

Our analysis does not only contain research on these groups, but it does help to highlight the types of consumers that health and wellness categories will cover.

Audiences Practice Different Healthy Habits

What generations do the casual dieter or fitness fanatic belong to?

What are the gender demographic breakdowns for varying healthy lifestyles?

It is important to understand how each persona breaks down by generation to see how specific healthy lifestyle habits are practiced by different age groups. 

Gen Z is more likely than all other groups to belong to the casual dieter persona, meanwhile baby boomers are the ones who most often practice whole body wellness.

Another area of focus inside the report is on specific diet trends and fads such as paleo, vegan and keto.

By using identifying factors found on individual users’ online profiles, we analyzed the gender breakdown for each of these diets. 

🚨**ALERT! We are going to break your assumptions**

You might be surprised to see that paleo (often marketed as a “caveman” kind of diet) is most discussed by females. Equally surprising is that the largest share of male voice centers around the vegan diet, even though you’ve been told all along that “men are meat eaters”. All of this turns out to be a baseless stereotype. Death to the “carnivore”, “manly-man” meals!

It’s important for brands and businesses interested in these health and wellness trends not to base any of their marketing strategies, product development or branding on assumptions. Data is crucial at every stage.

One more look at an audience analysis featured in the report. This one shows how each of our audience segments discuss taking probiotic supplements-- another hot trend in health and wellness.

Here it shows the clear growth of probiotics within the Whole Body Gurus segment, highlighting these consumers’ as “biohackers” who think they can truly hack their health using the right supplements.

Luxury Brands like LuLuLemon and Peloton Are Winning Consumers

Big name brands are growing like wildfire in the wake of the new health wokeness exhibited by consumers.

Now that people have unprecedented access to so many choices to practice a healthy lifestyle, as well as so much social and online influence showing them new options everyday, it’s interesting to see which companies can break through and how.

Consider the “athleisure” wear market, where brands like LuluLemon are redefining athletic apparel. They position their brand as workout gear that you should wear even when not working out. So, I can rep my lulu’s while scarfing down a piece of pizza! (chewing burns calories, right?).

LuluLemon has captured a target market of consumers who are passionate about other various healthy lifestyle trends. You’ll see in the report how they have garnered trust and loyalty from different types of healthy consumers.

In the below chart, we analyzed what drives LuluLemon’s customers actions and what draws them to engage the brand:

LuluLemon’s audiences express the themes of promotion, intent and quality at a high rate, and then subcategories of these themes, like discounts (which fall under promotion) or purchase (which is an intent measurement). On top of this is a sentiment analysis, where, for example, 67% of those who expressed purchase intent spoke positively about their experience.

Another rapidly growing brand is Peloton, which pioneered the luxury at-home exercise bike with all the bells and whistles. 

Inside our report, we used our signature “Brand Scorecard” to compare Peloton to other big brand names in the exercise category to show how consumers think and feel about their experiences.

Peloton won a handful of metrics, such as quality of experience, comfort and convenience. 

Conclusion

The social insights report on healthy lifestyles is chock full of interesting and surprising insights like ones seen here.

Looking at data-driven consumer trends and personas, you can peel back the curtain and truly know and understand who these people are and what they want, need, and expect from the brands they buy.

Obviously, a health-related brand needs to pay attention to this. But remember that as health and wellness becomes a top priority for more and more consumers, it will affect how they make consumption choices across many categories.

A mindfulness-focused person could choose to limit use of technology or get off of social media. Someone who has gone from casual dieter to fitness fanatic could evolve from having an occasional soft drink to eliminating soda entirely. Perhaps their new jams is seltzers. 

It’s important for brands and businesses interested in health and wellness trends not to base any of their marketing strategies, product development or branding on assumptions. Data is crucial at every stage.

Think about the ripples these various healthy lifestyle consumer segments could cause within your market, especially as consumers move to more natural and organic products.

It’s key for you to understand what drives your target customers and audiences to make choices and act the way they do. That’s the primary impetus behind our social listening reports.

As you’ll see in the report, it’s every kind of consumer, from Gen Z to baby boomer. And they have all kinds of interests and routines, from paleo to Peloton, from organic to OrangeTheory.

Click below to download the report and get your healthy dose of healthy lifestyles insights! ⤵️