Health Consumers rewrite every market

Christophe Jauquet
1 day ago
6 min read

Updated: 16 hours ago

Health consumers are the largest, most powerful - yet least understood - group of people.

Discover how health, well-being and longevity are growth engines for your business: Take part in the Healthusiasm LAB - Experience Days on the 4-5th of February to gain insights, experiences and co-created ideas.

Check it out >> https://events.healthusiasmlab.com/

The largest, least-understood consumer group
Healthusiasm Lab – Experience Days
- From “nice-to-have” to growth strategy
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There’s a not-so-silent trend running at the forefront of the global economy.

Healthusiasm

There is a rising expectation that every product, service, and experience should somehow improve our health and well-being.

The largest, least-understood consumer group

For decades, “patients” lived in the healthcare box and “consumers” lived everywhere else. That mental model is now broken.

This isn’t a wellness niche or a “nice-to-have” ESG slide. It’s one of the biggest macro trends shaping demand in almost every industry – from fashion and food to finance, mobility, tourism and tech. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it: people no longer separate “health” from “life”. They bring their health priorities into every purchase decision they make.

And that makes health consumers one of the most powerful – and most misunderstood – forces in the market today.

Data from global studies shows a clear pattern:

Around 7 in 10 people worldwide say that improving health and wellbeing is a key responsibility for brands. (HAVAS, 2023)
A similar share believes brands should have a health & wellness strategy at the core of their mission, not as a side campaign. (Ogilvy, 2020)
More than 8 in 10 people want greater control over their health decisions. (IPSOS, 2023)
Nearly 9 in 10 say they’re taking more action than a year ago to improve their physical, mental and emotional wellbeing. (Lululemon, 2024)

Put together, this means: the majority of your customers are already acting like health consumers, whether you recognise them as such or not.

They are not waiting for the healthcare system to tell them what to do. They are curating their own ecosystems: tracking sleep, upgrading food choices, choosing active commuting, moderating alcohol, seeking mental health tools, selecting workplaces and even financial products that feel “good for them”.

Patients and health consumers are no longer a segment at the edge of your market. They are the market.

Health-conscious behaviour already drives a big slice of your revenue

If health feels intangible, the money definitely isn’t.

Health-conscious choices now drive at least a quarter of market value across industries, and much more in sectors like sports, food & beverage and the green economy. In other words, up to one in four euros you earn may already be influenced by how people feel about their health.

Spending data confirms what’s happening in people’s heads. In the past year, consumers increased their spending on health & wellbeing by around 16%, while cutting back on fashion, eating out and alcoholic drinks. Wellness has effectively become a protected category in household budgets. (VML, 2024)

People may save on a new jacket, but they’ll keep the budget for healthier groceries, supplements, mental wellbeing tools, fitness, sleep, or recovery. They’re reallocating money from “looking good” to “feeling and functioning well”.

This is the Healthusiasm economy at work: health is no longer just something people worry about; it’s something they buy.

Healthy brands simply perform better

If health consumers are this powerful, what does it mean for brands?

First, people are working hard on themselves. Roughly 7 in 10 say they make a real effort to stay physically and mentally healthy. They are not looking for passive reassurance; they want practical partners on their journey.

Second, brands that deliver on this expectation outperform the rest. Recent research shows that

“healthy brands” – those that genuinely enhance people’s quality of life – are about 38% more meaningful than the average brand. (HAVAS, 2024)

Meaningfulness here is not a fluffy metric. More meaningful brands:

are considered more worth paying for
receive more loyalty and advocacy
are more resilient in times of crisis

It’s simple logic: when people invest more of their time, attention, and budget into health, the brands that actually help them feel and function better become disproportionately valuable.

Health isn’t just a benefit; it becomes one of the strongest value drivers in the relationship.

Why this is happening now

Three structural shifts make Healthusiasm a durable macro trend, not a passing hype:

Agency – People feel responsible for their own health. They expect tools, data, and partners that support their self-management, not just instructions from experts.
Blurring categories – Health shows up in what we eat, wear, drive, watch, and how we work or travel. The old separation between “healthcare” and “the rest of the economy” no longer matches how people live.
Energy & resilience – In a world of burnout, climate anxiety, and always-on pressure, people don’t just want to avoid disease; they want energy, mental focus, emotional stability, and a sense of meaning. That widens the playing field to almost every industry.

Ignore this, and health-conscious consumers will quietly route around your brand.

Embrace it, and you open up a powerful engine for growth and differentiation.

Healthusiasm is collaborative by design

Here’s the catch: no single brand can deliver the full health experience people are looking for.

Health consumers build ecosystems, not single-brand relationships.

They might combine:

a sportswear brand with a fitness app
a supermarket with a longevity clinic
a bank with mental wellbeing support
a hotel with sleep, recovery and nutrition programmes

This is why partnerships are becoming central to health marketing. You see it already in:

Food x Fitness collaborations where gyms, smoothie bars and nutrition apps design shared programmes.
Sober curiosity opening space for nightlife brands to partner with alcohol-free drinks, mental wellbeing apps or recovery experiences.
Social fitness & wellness travel, where events, tourism, music, and wellness platforms merge into one offering.

For the health consumer, it just feels like one integrated journey.

For brands, it’s a new operating system: design for collaboration, or risk becoming a small, forgettable tile in someone else’s ecosystem.

Healthusiasm Lab – Experience Days

All of this raises big questions for any business leader:

How big is the health consumer opportunity in my specific industry?
Where does my brand already create health value – and where am I leaving value on the table?
Who could or should I partner with to build a true health ecosystem around my customer?

That’s exactly what the Healthusiasm LAB – Experience Days are built to explore.

During these days, a curated group of business leaders from different sectors comes together to:

Decode the Healthusiasm trend with real data, cases and global benchmarks.
Understand how patients and health consumers reshape expectations in their category.
See how much of their current market value is already driven by health-conscious behaviours.
Learn why “healthy brands” outperform and what that could mean concretely for their products, services, and experiences.

But it doesn’t stop at inspiration.

The Experience Days are designed as a live ecosystem lab:

You’ll meet like-minded companies who all take health consumers seriously – from healthcare and pharma to food, retail, tech, finance, travel, and more.
You’ll work on shared challenges and opportunities, identifying where your offerings naturally connect.
You’ll explore partnership concepts that could make the health journey of your customers more seamless, more engaging, and more transformative.

Because in a Healthusiasm world, real impact and real growth won’t come from doing everything yourself. It will come from building the right alliances around the same health-motivated customer.

From “nice-to-have” to growth strategy

Healthusiasm is not a side-topic for CSR reports or a corporate well-being campaign.

It is:

a mass behaviour (most of your customers are already acting like health consumers),
a massive value driver (health-conscious behaviour influences at least 25% of market value in many categories),
and a performance differentiator (brands that genuinely improve people’s wellbeing are significantly more meaningful and resilient).

The question for leaders is no longer: “Should we do something with health and wellbeing?”

The real question is: “

How do we consciously design our business, our brand and our partnerships around health consumers – before they move on to those who already do?”

That’s the conversation at the heart of the Healthusiasm Lab – Experience Days. And it’s the conversation that will quietly decide which brands grow in the coming decade, and which ones are left behind in a world that increasingly votes with its health.