Well, well, wellness

Back in the 1990s, your correspondent wrote marketing copy for Airlift Book Company, which imported books from the small, radical, niche independent presses of America. The old, post-hippie liberal wing of America, one that was looking to do the right thing, whoever their president turned out to be.

Airlift’s warehouse shelves were stacked with books about wellness, personal development, mind, body and spirit, yoga, social justice, ecology, feminism, and then off into the whacky worlds of the occult.

Wellness is a fundamental, driving character in the drama that is 21st century culture and consumption.

What was marginal and peculiar back then is now mainstream – and a rudely healthy income stream too, as well as a new measuring stick for goodness, one that’s inserted itself into the health apps on your phone, in the dial of your smartwatch, and probably the door of your fridge.

The goal of wellness is central to many lives, and to many a brand’s IP. Wellness – its lack, its pursuit, its extension beyond the personal to the collective and to the planet – is a fundamental, driving character in the drama that is 21st century culture and consumption. 

But how do brands corral that character for their own ends, and do those ends align with the goals of wellness as a philosophy?

Above: Airlift Books published an edition of the bestselling self-help title, first out in 1984, You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise L Hay.

Those post-hippie Americans of the 1980s and 1990s New Age were responding to the collective excesses of the post Summer-of-Love 1970s. That Summer of Love was itself rooted in the pre-war German cults of Lebensreform [life reform] and the Nature Boys who followed proto-hippy Bill Pester from Germany to the California desert.

The global wellness economy is enormous and has doubled in size since 2013 and it is now a consumer priority across categories.

There they’d invent the health food movement and laid the kindling for the peace and love generation, while back in the 1930s Germany that Bill Pester had left, the craze for natural healing, wellness, vegetarianism and utopian goals became stepping stones on the path to Nazism. Good intentions and all that...

The arc light of wellness can cast some deep shadows, and while there is, today, a fringe politics that associates wellness with purity and far-right nationalisms, the branding of wellness in the mainstream global marketplace is a much more a diffuse play of light therapies designed to empower us, inspire us and get us to purchase as well as practice our wellness. But is an industry of wellness really good for us?

When a brand stops asking ‘How do we grow market share?’ and starts asking ‘How do we grow people?’, wellness becomes an ethos.

“Wellness has become part of the global economy,” says Thomas Kolster, author of Goodvertising and a marketing activist. “The global wellness economy is enormous and has doubled in size since 2013 and it is now a consumer priority across categories.”

It’s a priority that comes with a blizzard of branding, but it’s brands that promote change rather than product that interest Kolster. “It’s a capability, not a category. Most wellness campaigns sell improvement; transformative brands enable becoming. When a brand stops asking ‘How do we grow market share?’ and starts asking ‘How do we grow people?’, wellness becomes an ethos. That shift – from product to person, from promise to practice – is the defining move of a transformative organisation.”

The Run to Reconnect initiative, launched by adidas in 2020, was based on research showing the mental, as well as physical, benefits of 'mindful' running.

As for the brands Kolster sees making the most impact across the world of wellness, they’re focused less on the collective message than on personal contact. “Change always starts with the individual,” he says. “When people feel healthier, calmer and more confident, they behave differently towards others, communities and the planet. That’s why we see brands like adidas extending beyond performance into mental wellbeing through mindfulness and guided breathing within its running ecosystem.”

Selling a gym by talking about gym to people who don’t go to the gym is probably the worst thing you can do.

These more nuanced approaches can pay dividends. “Brands that help people move from intention to action are consistently more effective than those that simply signal virtue or aspiration,” he explains. “That’s why I’m drawn to what I call ‘transformative brands’. They don’t position themselves as heroes saving you; they act more like companions. Less ‘we’re fixing you or the world’, more ‘we’re here when you’re ready to change’.”

Inviting people into the wellness space when they don’t really want to be there was part of the foundational thinking behind McCann’s Glow campaign for PureGym. 

The 60-second spot features a dayglo figure clad in a furry costume of LED lights, cutting moves to a pumping soundtrack as it leaves a PureGym with more fizz than a gallon of Lucozade, fist-bumping its way past baristas, babies, buses and excitable dogs.

Above: The idea behind Glow was to sell the feel-good factor you get after a gym session, rather than the gym itself. 

“They needed to talk to people who don’t want to go to a gym,” says Imogen Tazzyman, ECD at McCann Manchester. “Selling a gym by talking about gym to people who don’t go to the gym is probably the worst thing you can do. It’s like using a spider to talk to someone with arachnophobia. 

"The big shift was to focus on what happens afterwards. That’s a brave space for a brand to own, looking at what happens after your brand has been consumed. So that’s where the strategy was born – don’t sell the gym, sell the feel-good. The feel-good is what happens after you leave the gym, not when you go in. You leave with that glow, and transfer it when you wave to a mate.”

There’s that fear that you’re almost treating wellness as something to achieve, to be determined about, so it becomes yet another stick to beat us with.

To make it feel real and to carry the emotion, they knew it couldn’t be a CGI or AI-assisted production. “How do you design a feeling?” muses Tazzyman. They had to keep it real. But it had to have that glow at its core, a figure of fun rather than a preacher. “There’s that fear that you’re almost treating wellness as something to achieve, to be determined about, so it becomes yet another stick to beat us with, to get addicted to, to over-achieve at or excel at. And that was important to us when developing and creating Glow. It felt a bit lighter, more casual, more entertainment, more being than doing.”

To turn that feel-good glow into a walking, high-fiving reality, they turned to costume designer Kate Tabor, who works with the Chemical Brothers. She created the costume of LED fibre optics, individually hand-sanded to get a crackly texture, and stitched into a suit that the dancer was then stitched inside of, and let loose in Greenwich, south London, on one of the hotter days of last summer. 

“Everywhere we went people were smiling and pointing, and they were glowing. We had the music going and people were buzzing. I knew we’d got something,” Tazzyman recalls.

In the industry I grew up in, wellness was about what you looked like and how much you weighed for women, and for men it tipped in to the toxic masculinity version of big muscles.

It’s significant that the glow figure is ungendered. “There are very different versions of wellness being peddled or sold to the different genders,” says Tazzyman. “In the industry I grew up in, wellness was about what you looked like and how much you weighed for women, and for men it tipped in to the toxic masculinity version of big muscles and that version of looking your best. But PureGym has done a lot of work in that space, being ‘designed for everybody’, and is genuinely inclusive and accessible. The ‘glow’ figure being genderless was a big deal to us.”

Above: Equinox's Question Everything But Yourself campaign opined that in a world of fakery, the physicality of the human body is reassuringly real.

When it comes to the multi-platform Question Everything But Yourself campaign for luxury fitness brand Equinox, working with Angry Gods in LA, the question was how to embody aliveness, energy and lived experience, the kind that people can can trust, over the synthetic illusions and projections of the AI age. So they set real photographs of real people beside a bestiary of bizarre and mildly disturbing AI confections.

The strategy has shifted from product storytelling to worldview storytelling: positioning the body as a source of truth in a world increasingly shaped by artificial signals.

The campaign didn’t begin as an AI story, but as a cultural observation – that fakeness is no longer an anomaly but part of the infrastructure holding everything up. “AI imagery, filters, performance wellness, curated identity - all of it feeds the same impulse to simulate outcomes without doing the work,” says Krish Menon, founder and CEO of Angry Gods. “So the strategic question wasn’t “how do we use AI?” It was: in a world where almost everything can be optimized or fabricated, what is still unquestionably real? The answer was the body.

“The body records effort. It resists shortcuts. It doesn’t care what you claim – only what you do. So the campaign uses AI deliberately, not as spectacle, but as contrast. It places synthetic imagery next to something that cannot be faked: earned physical presence.”

In a moment where trust is eroding everywhere – media, technology, even identity – the body becomes an anchor.

Just as PureGym was selling feelgood, so Equinox isn’t selling fitness, says Menon, it’s asserting belief. “The strategy has shifted from product storytelling to worldview storytelling: positioning the body as a source of truth in a world increasingly shaped by artificial signals. In a moment where trust is eroding everywhere – media, technology, even identity – the body becomes an anchor. The campaign reframes wellness not as self-improvement, but as self-trust built through action.”

Above: A recent campaign from Pukka emphasises the yearning for more simple, natural concept of health, as people tire of overcomplicated 'performative' wellness. 

The cultural dominance of the wellness industry in the 2020s conversely indicates a deeper and broader malaise, one that’s societal, and one that’s compounded by our digital habits. “As a culture, wellness reflects what people are anxious about, what they’re trying to control, and where they’re searching for meaning in a world that feels increasingly abstracted from reality,” says Menon. “But as a motivator, it only works when it’s grounded in effort rather than aesthetics. And as a practice, it has to live in the body, not just in content, language, or tools.

“Our point of view is simple,” adds Menon, “wellness collapses the moment it becomes performative. Real wellness is frictional. It asks something of you. And it produces change you can feel, not just signal.”

The stress of failing to measure up to your wellness goals – or directives – fuels Nothing Beats Nature for Pukka, with its gallery of women cracking up under the cosh of the latest self-care regimen. It all boils down to the wisdom of nature knowing best, and that means a good herbal cuppa.

Modern wellness has lost the plot. It can be so overcomplicated, artificial and performative.

“What was once a pursuit of health and balance has, for many, become overly complex, unnatural, and even a source of stress,” says to Elle Barker, chief marketing officer (UK&I) at Lipton Teas & Infusions. “ AI‑generated content, algorithmic feeds, pixel‑perfect everything… When consumers are questioning what’s real, the brands that live their truth stand out.” Some of the wellness trends have got out of hand, she adds, “but our ethos is keep it simple and tap into nature, the power of organic herbs and simple rituals that genuinely work.” 

Barker sees a tidal change in how people ‘consume’ wellness in the years ahead, in part spurred by the synthetic creep of screen culture and machine intelligence. The next wave of wellness, she believes, is all about stripping things back. “Modern wellness has lost the plot,” she says. “It can be so overcomplicated, artificial and performative. People are burnt out on over-engineered routines, and we’re seeing a real swing towards simple, grounding rituals that actually fit into real life." 

“Were also watching a cultural reconnection with nature gathering pace," she adds, "as people look for calm and clarity in a world that feels increasingly synthetic. The future of wellness has to be accessible, not exclusive. That’s exactly where Pukka sits.”

Above: Natura’s campaign, The Amazon Greenventory won the Cannes Lions 2025 Grand Prix in SDG. The project challenged the misconception that profit from the Amazon requires human (as well as planetary) health-harming deforestation.

Stripping back your message to the simple and natural can speak volumes, but when wellness messaging moves beyond the individual towards planetary health and environmental wellness, the terrain gets trickier. “Planetary and human health are deeply interlinked,” says Thomas Kolster. “But the challenge for brands has been communicating this connection without oversimplifying or moralising it.” He cites clothing brand Natura and its Amazon Greenventory campaign. 

Wellness as a category is being exploited, and the industry is eroding its own credibility by failing to self-regulate against exaggerated claims and unsubstantiated products.

“Natura has embedded agroforestry into its sourcing model, supporting biodiversity while sustaining the local communities that depend on healthy forest ecosystems.” Rather than extracting value, Natura invests in keeping the forests standing. “It’s turning conservation into a functioning economic system rather than a symbolic gesture.”

For all the good intentions embedded in wellness culture, it still carries the scent of that old snake oil, whether that be AI tools or dubious medical claims. “Wellness as a category is being exploited, and the industry is eroding its own credibility by failing to self-regulate against exaggerated claims and unsubstantiated products,” says Kolster. 

He points to the brands’ responsibility in knowing where to draw the line when it comes to frequenting social platforms that, as Kolster says, “do not uphold basic standards of ‘health truth’. When wellness drifts away from evidence and accountability, it doesn’t just endanger people, it endangers our industry.”