#185 The Marketing of Aging & What Makes A Wellness Trend Investable?

I love this question.

Of course I do, as the futurist and trend predictor of the show.

One thing to note straight away is he says trends, right? And I always say this, once something is a trend, it's already here.

So if you want to think foresight, if you want to think about things to invest in for the next five to ten years, that is a slightly different conversation.

You're looking for signals of change, you're looking for market shifts, you're looking for spend behaviour.

However, when it comes to trends, if something is a trend, if you're seeing more and more people are embracing something, talking about something, using something, buying something, then my best piece of advice I can give to you as a strategist is move quickly.

Do not spend a year, especially if it's like, I don't know, sometimes mid-sized businesses, they obviously... can't move as quickly as like small startup operators but it's this idea that okay this is a trend should we should we not let's wait and see let's wait and see let's wait and see and then by the time you decide okay cool let's go for it everybody else has already done it everybody's always everybody's already on board you've got more competition there is a lot to be said about moving fast and you don't have to be the first you know the first to do everything but being a fast follower is very important so i would say if you see something and you're trying to yeah kind of i guess justify is this commercially viable i think if you have enough signals to tell you that your consumer wants this move quickly get going do not wait because like everything everything's cyclical cyclical so there will be seasons that come and go and it's nothing wrong with taking part in that but there's nothing worse than waiting till this you know like i said the well is dried up and then you go oh we're doing it as well too little too late so inaction is the greatest risk get moving dan

I love it.

Inaction is the greatest risk.

That's a quote from my own

book.

That's a quote from my own first book, Power Hour.

I thought

I'd heard it before.

Inaction is the greatest risk of all is the full quote.

Yeah, isn't that fantastic? I think from an evidence point of view, how do you know what's robust? I like a trend that's built on something that's been around for a long time, but has then suddenly picked up sort of popularist interest.

So, you know, when you have something like cold water, it suddenly trends and becomes popular.

But actually, in certain cultures, that's been around for millennia.

And it's been part of society.

When you see the trend for kombuchas and fermented drinks, well, fermented foods have been around for a millennia.

And where there is a long... legacy of that product being used in particular populations and it's been proven to have again no downsides but potential upsides i think that where the trend is it's caught on to popular opinion is so much more interesting than when something has very low evidence is new to the marketplace and is surging and you might compare a red light face mask with cold plunge those be two good examples there's no long history of people using red light face masks to stimulate collagen production.

I think there's some evidence to that before I poo-poo it.

But principally, I prefer a trend which is based on an old bit of science, something that's been really well evidenced through isolated cultures or populations, and that has caught mainstream interest.

I think then you can be confident that there is a marketplace for that.

But more importantly, someone's not going to turn around a week later and say, the thing you thought was good for you is bad for you and order that investment and brand direction is now compromised and you are in the pit.