Wellness has expanded beyond a category to a set of behaviors. That shift is what makes it harder, and more important, for brands to understand how people actually engage with wellness in their daily lives. Wellness Principal Strategist, Claire Tassin, breaks down the three distinct wellness personas shaping decision-making today: Thrivers, Architects, and Balancers. What stands out? The same person can move between these depending on the outcome they’re trying to achieve. It’s a simple but powerful reminder: demographics won’t get you there. Behaviors will. If you’re innovating in wellness, this is the level of clarity that helps define where your product fits, and why it matters. 👇Read Claire’s perspective below.
Wellness doesn’t fit into one neat box; It stretches across wide ranges of both categories and human behaviors. One of the central goals of Mintel's new Wellness Solution is to help brands define their wellness consumer. Thanks to some excellent analysis by Joan Li (linked in the comments), we've homed in on 3 wellness personas: 1. Thrivers are motivated by trends and enjoy the rituals, process and education that come with an always-on self-improvement journey. 2. Architects are dedicated to their routines, and want proven, replicable solutions. 3. Balancers just want wellness to fit into their existing routines, and aim for simplicity and seamlessness. Critically, the same individual can inhabit a different persona for different wellness outcomes. I'm an Architect at the gym. I'm dedicated to my progressive overload lifting plan and not easily distracted by trends. On the other hand, I'm a Balancer about sleep. Sure, my sleep could use some improvement, but I'm not going out of my way to buy new products or add steps to my daily routine to enable that. By knitting together wellness outcomes with these personas, brands can chalk the field and identify where new products fit into consumers' wellness routines. I also love this approach because it's agnostic of demographics, and I say this as someone who led millennial research for years. I share a weight room with a wide sampling of people, but our behaviors are all pretty similar - in the gym at least. Understanding behaviors and attitudes gets us so much closer to consumer decision-making than birth years.