Health and wellness is an increasingly integral part of daily life for Canadians, especially women. In turn, the health and wellness category has become an attractive market for advertisers, with over 1 billion dollars spent in 2010 on advertising by companies involved in healthy living. In order to help advertisers better understand this important target audience, Yahoo! Canada developed a study to look at the role that health and wellness plays in Canadian women’s lives.

Key Findings

(1) to women, health and wellness is comprised of diet, exercise, mental wellbeing, and medical needs, which is important to them but achieving a healthy lifestyle is easier said than done

(2) women have others’ health to worry about such as children, a partner, or older family members

(3) health means different things to different people depending on family situation and other demographic factors, and

(4) information helps women stay healthy and they look for it using pull (needs-based searching) and push (browsing-based consumption) strategies.

Implications for Marketers

Brands need to recognize the role health and wellness plays in daily life to help, enable, and simplify the process. They need to develop an understanding of the audience, their targets, and what they want and need to achieve them. Brands should be where women are in order to have relevance and presence in the ‘push’ channels which are just as important as providing for their ‘pull’ needs.