What the health?

Bringing more health to more people is NEXT‘s mission, so our team recently took the opportunity to ask US consumers how satisfied they were with their health. Unsurprisingly, satisfaction was significantly lower than when we asked this same question in the before times (pre-Covid).

While this sentiment likely stems, in some part, from living through a global pandemic, generational changes in benchmarking health may also be contributing to the drop in satisfaction. In the same survey, we asked consumers what standards were most important when evaluating overall health.

Boomers and Gen-Xers were most likely to prioritize fact-based measures, like health-indicative hard numbers such as BMI and blood test results. In contrast, younger consumers (Gen Z and Millennials) whose numbers and spending power are on the rise, valued emotional and experiential measures, which generally encompass how the body and mind feel.

This shift from objective to subjective measures, along with a marketplace still working to deliver products and experiences that serve the emerging importance of introspective health values, might be contributing to the current decline in health satisfaction.

So what does this shift mean for natural and organic brands and the industry? Waiting out the current state of the pandemic might not be enough to deliver on health; nimble brands are not only adjusting strategies because of Covid, but also factoring in evolving values and metrics when it comes to developing and marketing consumer products.

NEXT is here to help you explore this shift in consumer thinking and unlock new opportunities to serve consumers, let’s talk!

See you NEXT month!