Wellness, the new drug of choice in a post pandemic world
If you’re currently building a brand of any form, my advice to you is bring wellness in, and if possible, make it the centre of everything you’re doing. The wellbeing sector is thriving. In fact that is an understatement. It’s gone bonkers and is expected to grow at an accelerated pace from the $4.5trillian economy it's already created.
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The pandemic has done many things, for some it has increased their household outgoings due to four legged purchases and accelerated baby making, for others it has been a very real and challenging battle of survival. For all however, it has shifted our perspective on health from something which is a given to being very much a gift. It has brought into sharp focus human vulnerability and highlighted the very real factors which are contributing to thousands of deaths across the globe.
For the first time in my lifetime, and I suspect in the last century, the majority of humans are beginning to understand that a holistic systemic approach to health is perhaps our only hope for resilience in the future. Meaning, if we wait until we feel ill, it's too late.
With this in mind we’re seeing some phenomenal innovation pop ups to help improve our daily wellbeing and in part, help us survive. I’ve put together some top line wellness trends that I think you need to take note of, absorb yourself in and potentially build into your future brand plans.
These are just some of the trends which have been highlighted in the recent Global Wellbeing Summit and the full report can be downloaded here.
Hopefully these will give you a breadth of understanding on how vast this landscape is, and perhaps spark some ideas of your own.
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Wellness Music
To be honest, I quite liked Enya growing up, I don’t know if that is something I should admit to but there you have it. Perhaps I was ahead of my time, you heard it here first. Wellness Music is about to explode and is soon to become a genre in itself. Big players Apple & Spotify have created new categories to house this music and provide the perfect playlist to transport listeners out of their very hectic and anxiety induced lives. ‘Nice to have’ I thought, but is there any weight to it? A Berlin based start-up called Endel has answered that question and is tracking the benefits of music on human wellbeing and happiness. The app itself has over 2 million downloads across the world and provides music to improve your focus, help you relax and even claims to put you to sleep within 3 mins. Every soundscape is tailored to you from Endel, using wearable tech to pull in all your data, providing you with a continuous opportunity to harness the power of music. We can see this really proving successful in a live space as well, perhaps festivals and events can start to envisage a chill or relaxing space where audiences are able to lie down and let the music roll through them. We’ve already seen some great events starting to pop up including Getahead Festival, a wellbeing and music event combined. Another sign that wellness and music are joining forces is that mega mediation apps such as Calm and Headspace are essentially becoming labels, releasing their own music to support their audiences.
Personalised Nutrition
According to the Global Wellbeing Summit we have come to the end of our ‘immune boosting’ era which saw a crazy rise during 2020, with random and unscientifically proven brands and products promising this to consumers. In 2021 we are set to enter an ‘immune balance’ period where the aim is to go deeper and dig into the science in order to stabilise our immune system rather than superturbo it. The way we are going to do this is by creating technology and brands which are designed for each individual's immune system. Research is staking up around personalised nutrition showing that different foods have vastly different effects on individuals and we can see businesses advancing in this area, across blood testing, microbion and genetic testing to help support this. Diets are going to hopefully move from fads to personalised, knowledge based lifestyles for every single individual. How we will see this show up in the hospitality industry remains to be seen, however I would like to think that the industry would start to adopt the curated option based approach it has to dairy and gluten, perhaps even starting to offer ‘immunity’ based menu choices.
Air Quality
Did you know you can find out your breathing IQ? Dr. Belisa Vranich a clinical psychologist has created a process which allows you to easily find out if you’re breathing in the best way possible for your body and mind. This is new, but making the most of breath is not, in fact hotels and spas have been slowly adding in breathing specific treatments for sometime, the festival industry has started to respond with specific breathwork festivals such as The Breathing Festival by Dan Brulé and more. An exciting project coming this year is Field, a multimedia AI driven experience which takes place in a cocoon like pod and incorporates breathwork into its brain training approach. Breath is just one part of this trend however, consumers are becoming much more aware of the threats of air pollution and we’ve seen air cleaners skyrocket in sales during lockdown. Scientists are citing air pollution as one of their main concerns for the next decade and our survival. Consumers will begin to consider air pollution when they travel, or where they stay or where they live.
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These are just a few of what is set to be a hugely popular market moving forward. I have no doubt that the $4.5 trillion economy will double if not triple in the coming years and consumers clearly have a desire to make wellness part of their lives in every way possible.
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