Health and wellness has moved from a niche fad to one of today's biggest lifestyle trends. Consumers' quest to learn about and make choices toward a healthier and more fulfilling quality of life has now spawned a multimillion-dollar industry, encompassing everything from organic foods and spa treatments to disease-prevention therapy and healthcare services at the workplace.
To help businesses connect to this growing U.S. $400 billion market, Ketchum has created Well-Connected, a brand-building specialty that combines consumer marketing practices with health and wellness insights. Well-Connected creates lasting connections between consumers and brands that promise health and wellness benefits. The specialty integrates a core group of seasoned branding, media relations and research professionals from Ketchum's Brand Marketing, Food & Nutrition, and Healthcare Practices to understand and craft communications that drive wellness brand preferences and purchasing decisions.
Well-Connected is grounded on studies by
Ketchum Global Research Network, including a 2008 survey titled "Health Attitudes and Well Connections: A Ketchum Consumer Study." The study polled more than 4,000 U.S. consumers and revealed five distinct population segments based on their health-decision-making motivations, influences and demographic factors:
- Health Neutrals: Those with no strong opinions about health and wellness
- Health Sharers: Those who give and take health information from a variety of sources
- Health Elites: Those who are self-reliant health information seekers and give, but don't take, health advice
- Health Traditionalists: Those who want health information and advice only from health professionals
- Health Isolates: Those who are emphatically not interested in health information.
Using these findings and other proprietary studies, Well-Connected leverages in-depth insights to help companies fine-tune their health and wellness messages to better target audiences through these strategies:
- Uncovering the influences that drive health decisions and behaviors
- Finding out the degree to which consumers share and seek health information
- Pinpointing the consumer health messages that will resonate best
- Determining the places where consumers will be most receptive to those messages
- Identifying the channels where consumers will interact and engage most effectively.
Ketchum has already used these tactics to help a number of companies with these Well-Connected programs:
- Helping a major healthcare company connect with consumers about the financial benefit of health and wellness, and helping consumers to make better lifestyle choices.
- Making the connection between a major food company's health and wellness products with pharmacists, and shifting pharmacists' perceptions of these products from food brands to functional foods.
- Changing healthcare professional and consumer perceptions about a large food company's products by communicating nutritional qualities, including heart-healthier oil content, zero trans fat, natural ingredients, and low salt content.
- Working with a large healthcare company to promote the benefits of its family of products as valuable health and wellness resources for the entire family.
Ketchum Well-Connected uniquely fuses proven consumer marketing practices with proprietary health and wellness insights to drive awareness and preference for brands and products that foster healthier and richer lives.
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