Health Trends: 3 things you need to know to reach young shoppers
According to Barrington, Illinois-based consulting firm Brick Meets Click, millennials think differently about their health than older generations, and that shift suggests some exciting potential opportunities for retailers.
The new generation has shifted the emphasis from ‘which will make me healthy’ to ‘what will make me healthy’. Since Millennials are less dependent on doctors and more on themselves to stay healthy, health shopping is important to them.
Here are three important things to keep in mind when targeting this demographic:
- They are willing to pay more for products with health-promoting properties. They also consume a lot of health information online, but they might need to be reassured that they are doing the right thing because there is so much of it and it can be contradictory and hard to decipher.
- Find ways to increase access to in-store dietitians who can provide advice and reassurance on what they can do to stay healthy. This means encouraging dietitians to reach more people through store visits and to the community through “lunch and learn”.
- Make it faster and easier for millennials (and other shoppers) to find popular “good for you” products by improving navigation signage and shelf sets to showcase these popular products.
See “the whole human being”
Retailers and their supply partners need to paint a more complete picture of their consumers if they are to tap into the demand for health and wellness products that meet their unique needs.
“We think companies will start to see the whole human being, not a 2D version,” said Raj Shroff, director of PINE Strategy & Design, based in Columbus, Ohio. “If they do that, they’re a dinosaur. What happened during COVID, companies had to adapt to see the whole person, because, for example, people were working from home and we were all seeing each other at home.
The grocery store, he said, needs to do something similar. In the future, one way to do this might be to tap into the metaverse. If retailers have access to a virtual version of consumers’ kitchens, for example, they can provide a much more specialized list of suggested items tailored to their individual health and wellness needs. When consumers go online, the only products available to them may be those that match their particular health profile.
Seeing the whole person is more important than ever, because “health” has become more complicated than ever, with not only a host of specific diets and physical ailments to consider, but also with mental health, exercise and sleep are on so many people’s radar, said PINE partner John Youger.
“Health feels like it’s not easy anymore.”
