Consumer Shopping Habits for Wellness and Environmentally ...

General Introduction to Health and Wellness
Consumers today are participating in Health and Wellness (hereinafter ―H+W‖) with the goal of
moving toward the realization of quality life experiences. Quality life experiences include being fully
engaged in life, having fun, enjoying authentic experiences, not living with restriction or denial, and
enabling play and imagination.
While many in the industry tend to define a consumer‘s participation in H+W as motivated by
condition management or the goal of averting illness, consumers are not just motivated only to avoid
such potential negatives, but to seek positive H+W goals as well. This is not to say issues of
condition management and illness prevention are unimportant, rather, individuals tend to focus on
the broader, more appealing goal of achieving the "good life." Taking this consumer view of Health
and Wellness, allows us to go beyond the traditional categories associated with health and wellness
such as food and beverage, supplements, and medicine and consider a range of experiences and
products that aid consumers in their pursuit of the ―good life.‖ This chapter gives a general overview
of H+W from the consumer perspective and illustrates the relationship between H+W and
Sustainability.
The World Model
To better understand the H+W arena, we apply The Hartman Group‘s World model, based on an
integration of traditional quantitative methods with innovative qualitative techniques drawing from
sociology, anthropology and ethnography. A world perspective can be applied to any product or
service category which has a significant lifestyle component. Using a world perspective gives us a
tool to conceptualize consumer behavior without
resorting to simplistic segmentation schemes.
Instead, looking at the World in terms of Core, Midlevel
and Periphery lifestyle orientations,
experiences and products, facilitates a more rich
description of the various levels of involvement
within Health and Wellness.
For example, individuals and organizations in the
Core are the most active in a given World. In
addition to representing the smallest ―segment‖ of
the World, it is from the Core that most information
and cutting edge trends disseminate. In contrast,
Figure 1 – The World of H+W
those in the Periphery maintain only minimal, infrequent, and less-intense involvement. Between
these two poles is the Mid-level where the majority of consumers are located. The Mid-level contains
a diverse range of consumers, many of whom have adopted behaviors and attitudes similar to those
in the Core, but may not have fully incorporated the range of health and wellness activities into their
lifestyle.
In our sample we find that thirteen percent of all consumers (40 million U.S. consumers) fall into the
Core H+W segment. The majority of all consumers fall in the Mid-level segment at 62% (190 million
U.S. consumers). The remainder are Periphery consumers at 25% (77 million U.S. consumers).
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