Innovative home and building product brands integrate wellness into their business now.

This industry as a whole may be slow to catch on, but some early adopters are setting a positive example.

Connected smart home products are certainly ahead of the wellness curve. After all, the smart home technology market is already flooded with techy health products — home exercise equipment, air purifiers, smart scales, lightbulbs that filter out blue light at night, sleep-tracking beds, alarm clocks that mimic the sunrise to gently wake you up, smart water bottles that remind you when to drink and iPhone-connected home air quality monitors … just to name a few.

Wray Ward also works with industry leaders in this space:

• Greenfiber, in partnership with Trane, created a complete home system built around wellness: Combining a well-insulated envelope with state-of-the-art mechanicals, The Ultimate in Sanctuary sets a new building standard with greater comfort, noise reduction, safety and energy efficiency.
• VELUX skylights has a long history of positioning skylights as a way of creating better living environments, from informing consumers about the benefits of home airing to improve indoor air quality to the psychological value of creating nature connections inside our homes. (We supported the nature connections campaign in the United States through influencer marketing integrations with Jungalow and Anita Yokota.)

Companies like VELUX do an incredible job of integrating wellness into their marketing in a way that resonates with audiences and naturally connects to the brand. VELUX, for example, also includes health and wellness messaging in much of its content. (In one post on its Why Skylights blog, the manufacturer shared three ways to bring the outside into a small bathroom.)

In 2020, VELUX educated the trade about the benefits of natural ventilation by sponsoring the High Performance Building Zone at the International Builders’ Show. A VELUX representative talked about how skylights can improve indoor air quality and demonstrated the automation of home airing.

What can you do to ensure your brand doesn’t get left behind?

For consumers, the rise of wellness as a lifestyle means embracing a sense of integrated well-being. They achieve a holistic lifestyle but understand they can’t do it alone. They seek advice, often turning to social media — the perfect place for brands to share bite-sized, practical and accessible information. Our decisions and choices are deeply influenced by our social network, which is good news for brands that want to tell a wellness story. Furthermore, social media is targeted, meaning you have a great chance of matching your content to the right person. If you regularly give your target audience content they crave, you can build trust and convert them into loyal customers.

For brands, wellness is becoming a disruptive force. But just as true wellness cannot be attained simply by using health-promoting products and services, brands can’t succeed at wellness storytelling simply by adopting wellness as another selling point.

Instead, consider how to reorient your company values to reflect those of consumers. How can you take a powerful movement and make it yours? How can your products or services facilitate holistic, enduring wellness and an improved mind, body and spirit? And how can you tell that story in an authentic and ownable way?