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Wellness Industry Marketing Trends
For reasons explained in our research below, it is not possible to determine if the Canadian wellness industry's marketing is following any current trends. Additionally, the variety of industry segments likely makes discerning trends across the industry nearly impossible; a corporate wellness company would likely require a different marketing approach than a yoga studio, for example. However, we have found a few patterns across multiple companies which, while we hesitate to call them trends, nevertheless characterize wellness marketing in Canadian wellness companies.
THE USE OF PASTELS
- Despite being in different industry segments and reaching different clients, nearly all wellness companies in Canada prefer the use of pastel colors in their marketing and social media.
- Curtis Health, a corporate wellness company, has some exceptions to this rule which follow a particular pattern: As shown on their Twitter feed, marketing (including content marketing) aimed at individuals is characterized by the use of pastels, while marketing aimed at corporations often, though not universally, switches to darker and more serious shades of blue and purple.
GENDERED TARGETING
- In most cases, a wellness company's marketing is very gender-specific, but which gender depends on their industry segment and therefore their target audience.
- Yoga and wellness & beauty marketing nearly always features women, for example, while corporate wellness and sports nutrition companies feature men.
- Cannabis-based wellness companies, on the other hand, rarely feature people in their marketing, preferring to focus on green cannabis plants (often in a natural setting), healthy-looking fruits and vegetables, and sterile medical equipment.
RESEARCH STRATEGY
We began our research with a broad-based search of Canadian news media sources — e.g., CTV News, the Vancouver Sun, Skift, the CMA, etc. — in the hopes that one or more had noted trends in advertising and marketing. This proved fruitless, however, as these sites were far more focused on non-marketing wellness trends, particularly the popularity of cannabis, than on how those trends are being marketed.
Therefore, we switched gears and attempted to locate examples of marketing and advertising through which we might determine trends. We used the WeLoveAd database to search terms key to the wellness industry — e.g., yoga, nutrition, organic, spa, wellness, etc. — and then filter these to ads published in the last 18 months in Canada. However, in each case, this resulted in zero ads found. While removing the time filter provided marketing examples for most categories in Canada, we deemed that looking at older ads was unlikely to provide insights into current trends. A search of YouTube likewise found examples of marketing, but the vast majority were too old and the most recent too few to indicate any trends.
Finally, we studied the sites and social media of top Canadian wellness companies, including Yoga Tree, withinUs, Curtis Health, and Neptune Wellness Solutions. (While we reviewed other companies, these four proved typical within their respective industry segments and so, for the sake of a clean resource list, provided the examples in our findings above.) This provided some useful insights into their marketing, but we are hesitant to call these trends both for reasons that are explained in our findings and because the scope of a single Wonder request prevents us from researching a large enough sample size of companies and marketing samples through time to truly judge trends through time.