The Impact of Health & Wellness on Grocery Stores

Keep an eye out for grocers playing more of a role in health & wellness in the near future, a move fueled by consumer demand. According to Leslie Sarasin, President & CEO of Food Manufacturing Institute, grocery stores are situated perfectly to assist consumers on their health & wellness journey. This comes at a time of high competition for grocery stores—not only competing against themselves, but also online retailers, as we previously wrote about.  

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it now — as people prefer holistic approaches to health and wellness, food retailers, standing in the nexus position between food and pharmacy, as well as nutrition and provision of medical services, are uniquely positioned as health and wellness resources for their customers.” – Leslie Sarasin, FMI

Health and wellness engagement at grocery is a huge opportunity for healthy brands to pair with health influencers to meet the needs of Americans. Through their concerted efforts from office to shelf, health influencers and brands can influence the decisions of consumers at a much higher level.

The advantage will go to brands that are smart about engaging key influencers geo-targeted to store locations and partnering with key customers to promote their products and offerings. Pairing “near store” influencer and consumer reach with “in store” shopper marketing will certainly help consumers make healthier decisions.

The Importance of Influencers in a Changing Grocery Landscape

The way Americans shop for groceries is changing. Online food shopping is on the rise, and it is predicted to grow five-fold over the next decade. This is a great opportunity for brands to get their products to consumers. However, with the rise of online shopping, the opportunities to get in front of consumers have been reduced, and the number of these opportunities will continue to diminish. We’re not expecting online shopping to turn the grocery store model on its head, but it will lead to change in how CPG brands market their products. That’s why, now more than ever, face-to-face influencers are so important for connecting healthy brands to consumers.

Grocery Stores Are Here To Stay

First off, the grocery store model will not become extinct anytime soon. Yes, online grocery shopping is increasing, and will continue to increase. However, the majority of shopping is still done in person. Currently, only 25% of household buy groceries online, and online shopping represents less than 5% of all grocery sales. But the online grocery platform is expected to grow rapidly. So much so, that grocery stores have even adopted digital shopping—tying online ordering with curbside pick up. In this way, they are better able to compete with the convenience of online options.

Landscape For Marketers

Online grocery shopping has provided a challenge for marketers. As powerful as shopper marketing is, it could see a diminished role in an environment where consumers aren’t going into the store. However, marketers can still effectively reach consumers through tried and tested ways—print, digital, social, and face-to-face interactions.

Reaching Consumers In An Increasingly Digital World

In the gold-rush excitement surrounding this seemingly untapped platform, marketers must remember that the digital shopper is still... well, a shopper. These shoppers seek recommendations from trusted sources of information—dietitians, personal trainers, nurses, pediatricians, etc. Through face-to-face influencers, brands can get even more than impactful recommendations. These influencers provide a personal experience with the brand, an increasingly valuable interaction.

Grocery stores are here to stay, and so is shopper marketing. But their roles will change as we move forward. Digital platforms are not only shaping the way people buy their groceries, but also path to purchase. With less opportunities for brands to get in front of consumers, health influencers will continue to valuable intermediary between healthy brands and consumers.  

What Makes a Source Credible and Trustworthy?

In a time when trust in traditional advertising is declining, consumers are constantly evaluating the sources from which they get information. With so much fake news and misleading stories, what should people look for in a reliable source?

We’ve found that there are three characteristics that make a source credible and trustworthy. First, they must be knowledgeable on diet and nutrition. Second, they should have interests that are aligned with the consumer—promoting a healthy lifestyle. Finally, this trusted and credible source must be able to provide relevant, actionable advice.

Knowledge and Expertise

Knowledge and expertise are arguably the two most important factors in determining the credibility of a source. Consumers are constantly looking for answers to complicated health & wellness questions—and often these answers vary depending on the person. A quick Google search seeking a solution to nutrition advice can yield “answers” from scores of so-called “experts.” But who are these people? Do they have a nutritional background? Do they know the consumer and their dietary needs? The internet is cluttered with so-called “experts,” making it extremely difficult to understand whose opinions matter, and what advice to act on.

With the media creating this clutter, where can consumers turn for dietary advice? Their hand-picked health professional. Why? This professional has gone through the extensive education required to obtain a degree and are counseling people everyday! The same cannot be said about the blogger or journalist, whose interests are not always in line with consumers’.

Interests That Align With the Consumer

The evolution of internet marketing has led to an enormous number of conflicting voices in the health & wellness conversation. For bloggers and journalists, it is in their interest to promote products or headlines that will attract attention, drive clicks, and increase advertising revenue. Based on their incentive to create traffic, their credibility should immediately be questioned. Are they truly interested in improving consumers’ health, or in gaining clicks?

The main objective of everyday health influencers is exceptionally clear: to help the people they counsel adopt and maintain a healthy lifestyle. These professionals want to share information and findings that are relevant to the people they counsel. Finally, they want to share relevant better-for-you products, because that can lead to change.

Context and Action

How valuable is health advice if it’s not applicable and actionable? Creating relevant and actionable advice is a huge hurdle for online sources. Often times, a problem is highlighted, an argument is made and supported, and the article ends. The reader is left with no actionable advice. Further, that health & wellness monologue might not even apply to them!

Personal healthcare professionals have an advantage that other sources don’t. They have the benefit of a two-way conversation. They can assess the dietary needs, restrictions, or preferences of their patient. These health professionals can then, in turn, make a personal and actionable recommendation.

Personal, everyday, health professionals meet all of these criteria. No other source does. When consumers don’t know where to turn, health professionals can cut through the clutter.

Meeting Consumers Where They Are

Allied health professionals are leaving their offices to meet consumers where they are—both literally and figuratively. This LA Times article describes the efforts of health professionals in California to meet people wherever they can influence purchasing decisions, including the grocery store. 

“It’s become increasingly clear that people’s regular eating and exercise habits have a much bigger effect on their health than the time spent at a doctor’s appointment.”  - Glen Melnick, USC Health Economics Professor

The conversation between health professionals and consumers about the foods they eat is a critical component of a preventive approach to health and wellness. The conversations between health professionals and consumers are exceptionally important to educating consumers, and in turn, preventing diseases. The location of this conversation is no longer limited to an office.

Why Digital Influencers Aren’t Enough

We live in a digital age, rife with social networks, digital publishing platforms, and online communities that tantalize marketers with a seemingly affordable and measurable way to reach large numbers of consumers. It’s no wonder marketers have flocked to digital tactics to support their brands.

But as the value of a digital impression has declined, due to ad blockers, bots, and a lack of consumer engagement, many marketers have altered their digital approach to focus on influencers as opposed to advertising. But are digital influencers like bloggers and social media darlings really an effective and compelling way to market to consumers?

Authors Ed Keller and Brad Fay think not. In The Face-to-Face Book, Keller and Fay conclude that real relationships rule in a digital age, with 90% of recommendations that lead to consumer action occurring offline. While the internet can deliver impressive scale, it is a mile wide and an inch deep, lacking the ability to deliver real engagement and real influence—the kinds of interactions that drive choice at shelf.

While digital remains an effective approach for building brand awareness and generating interest, a default reliance on digital influencers can be a mistake—particularly for healthy brands. According to the most recent IFIC Food & Health Survey, just  13% of consumers trust bloggers for accurate health & nutrition information. Turns out, these digital influencers have neither the trust nor credibility to effectively deliver healthy brand messages  or recommendations.   

Here is why face-to-face influencers deliver the results that digital influencers cannot:

1. Credibility

IFIC found that consumers trust dietitians/nutritionists and their own personal health professional more than other sources, including TV personalities, bloggers, and social media. Will your healthy brand messages be delivered to consumers by someone they trust?  

2. Appropriate Context

McKinsey & Company reports that the setting or context in which a recommendation is made is  crucial to the power of the message. Messages delivered within a tight, trusted network, such as that between a consumer and their health professional, have a greater impact than those circulated through dispersed communities.

3. Face-to-Face

There are 15 billion conversations about brands every week in America. With trust in traditional advertising down, and 90% of recommendations that lead to consumer action happening offline, marketers should focus on earning face-to-face recommendations from trusted influencers to cut through the clutter and maximize impact.

As Keller and Fay found, good marketing starts with conversations, and some conversations are more impactful than others. By all means, healthy brands should build awareness digitally.  But, if marketers want their brand to become part of a consumer’s everyday choices, they must have their messages the information delivered from a trusted source, in the right context, and face-to-face.

The Brand Perspective on Influencer Marketing

Having spent over 15 years as a clinical dietitian before transitioning to the food industry, I recognize how important it is for brands and health professionals to work together to improve Americans’ eating habits. As evidenced by our growing rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease, and an aging population, it is critical that we work together to educate Americans on the role food plays in our health and longevity. 

At StarKist, our mission is to provide healthy food products for all Americans.  We understand that the vast majority of Americans consume less than a quarter of the recommended amount of seafood a week, and our aim is to provide healthy, convenient options to help overcome this.

We know from recent IFIC research that consumers are trusting of health professionals, especially Registered Dietitians Nutritionists (RDNs), to provide sound advice.  It makes perfect sense for food companies like Starkist to work with RDNs and provide them with information and teaching tools to help consumers understand the nutritional value of our products and how they can fit into their everyday lives.     

Educating health professionals about the nutritional value of shelf stable seafood while providing convenient and simple ideas for consumers to include it in their meals can help increase seafood consumption.  Whether providing recipes, tips for how to pair our products with different produce items to make a meal, or demonstrations on how to use our products, we work with RDNs in all areas of practice to get the message of “seafood twice a week” out. 

We like working with RDNs in the community because we know they are hearing firsthand what consumers struggle with.  They are the trusted resource for many consumers and can help us understand their clients’ concerns and nutritional needs so we can provide products and ideas to meet those needs.  It is a two-way street!   We need each other to improve the health of Americans.

Laura Molseed Ali, MS, RDN, LDN is the Registered Dietitian Nutritionist for StarKist Co.  She has over 25 years of experience having worked in clinical, retail and the food industry.  Laura is a member of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the Pennsylvania Dietetic Association, and is a former President of the Pittsburgh Dietetic Association.   She is an avid proponent that healthy eating is a delicious way of eating, and works with StarKist Co. to develop recipes and programs for consumers and health care professionals.

Defining A Health Influencer

Malcolm Gladwell is often credited with the birth of influencer marketing as his 2000 book “The Tipping Point” highlighted the unique impact certain individuals can have over the preferences—and buying habits—of the people they interact with.

Over the past 16-plus years, influencer marketing has become a broad and varied discipline. As the value of mass media and now digital media are continuing to be questioned, consumer packaged goods brands are turning more and more to influencer marketing to help their brands reach that proverbial tipping point.

These brands have scrambled to identify those key individuals that can persuade others to buy their product, and they have sought them out in communities, on websites, via social media, on TV and in print. If you look around, you can see attempts at influencer marketing everywhere you look. The definition of an influencer, for many, has become very broad and somewhat diffuse.

Our exclusive focus on health & wellness, however, leads us to a very specific and focused definition of an influencer—a definition based on the trust and credibility that consumers demand from those that advise them on their health and wellness.

So, what constitutes a health & wellness influencer at Pulse? For us, it’s someone who:

1.  Counsels, trains or advises people in a professional setting. People trust the health & wellness professionals that they have hand-selected to support them. This includes practicing dietitians, nurses and nurse practitioners, physical trainers, health coaches, pediatric professionals, midwives and many other everyday health & wellness professionals. As the International Food Information Council found, that trust does not necessarily extend to bloggers, TV personalities, the news media, and other sources of indirect influence.

2.  Counsels, trains or advises people on behavior change. When people seek out health & wellness solutions they are looking for products that support positive changes in their behavior—small steps to better health. Whether that’s “free from” food products that support their aspirational wellness goals or functional products that address a specific health need, consumers look for advice on products that help them change their behavior. Our definition of an influencer, therefore, focuses on the professionals who spend time with consumers talking about how to make those positive changes. These “allied” professionals often spend significantly more time with consumers than doctors and make a much more effective vehicle for delivering your brand message directly to the consumer.

3.  Sees patients or clients on a regular basis. Far too often, “influencers” can only deliver that influence indirectly through blog posts, tweets, Facebook posts, or 90-second local news segments. We seek out professionals who see dozens of patients and clients on a weekly basis in order to provide clients with reach to their target consumer. We want the influence delivered directly to the consumer through a face-to-face interaction, not indirectly through media.

4.  Has the training and expertise to understand the needs of their patients & clients. What could be more targeted than relying on the education and experience of a trained health & wellness professional to determine for which patients & clients your product is most relevant. With our influencers, there’s no need to look to demographics or markers to identify which consumers to reach. If you find the right influencers, they do the targeting for you.

5.  Is willing to use branded educational materials, product samples and coupons in their counseling interactions. Not every health & wellness influencer is willing, but our research shows that more than 90% of influencers do recommend specific brands by name to patients and clients. But even when they are generally willing to incorporate materials, we want to be sure that your brand materials are highly relevant to the conversations they are having with people and that they meet a specific need for the consumers they are counseling, training and advising on a daily basis.

It’s not just a one-way street, our members expect high-quality educational materials from us. They rely on us to provide materials that are not only informative and credible, but which are also relevant to the conversations they are having with the people they advise. 

Influencers are at the core of what we do, and we are constantly looking to add qualified influencers to our network. If you fit the description above, join our influencer collective and start receiving educational materials, samples, and coupons that can make a difference in the lives of the people you counsel, train and advise.

PulseConnect. Making Connections, Influencing Behaviors.

Years ago a “health influencer” was someone narrowly defined within the healthcare field: a doctor, nurse, dietitian, or physical therapist. Today, a health and wellness influencer is more broadly defined to reflect a wide variety of professionals that influence Americans’ health and wellness, including personal trainers, midwives, and health coaches.  While practice titles may be different, all kinds of health and wellness professionals leverage a high level of influence with consumers.  Together, this new collective of health and wellness influencers is connecting with more and more clients in novel ways—and brands are recognizing their power.  

Pulse Health & Wellness’s HCPNetwork was an early example of this kind of collective—a place for healthcare professionals to opt-in to receive educational materials, samples and coupons provided by brands.

Relaunching as PulseConnect, this collective of health & wellness experts is expanding its focus and its membership. As a member of PulseConnect, you can receive high-quality, branded educational materials for yourself and your patients, including scientific backgrounders, patient handouts, teaching tools, samples, recipes and coupons.  Plus you will have the opportunity to provide insights and feedback to manufacturers through surveys and one-on-one interviews.

Healthy brands understand that a personal experience with a product and familiarity with its nutritional profile are what drive your recommendation. They know that you need to experience it yourself before you’re comfortable sending your clients in their direction.  In virtually every PulseConnect program,  there will  be special incentives for you to bring a product home and give it a try.  Of course, as you make your recommendations to patients and clients, you’ll have special offers for them too—in the form of samples, coupons, recipes and health & wellness tips.

Over the next few weeks, PulseConnect will be sharing case studies that demonstrate the power of the collective to consumers and influencers. For now, sign-up to be part of this exciting, dynamic collective and invite your friends/colleagues to join too!