How Wellness Brands Are Winning the Medicine Cabinet

My mother is a lifelong case study for me. She’s a warm-hearted person in her late 60s living with obesity, diabetes, and uncontrolled hypertension. Despite her cardiologist’s pleas, she’s a reluctant pill-taker. Not only is her self-stated life goal to ‘get off every medication’, but she has little to no idea what her pills really do.

However, if you open her bathroom cabinet, you will find a wellness wonderland: herbal elixirs, hormone strips, collagen powders, five different kinds of magnesium stacked like a rainbow, which, according to my calculations, is worth a small fortune.

Not long ago, my mother “missed” enough doses of her prescription meds that she suffered a stroke. We may all know someone like this, and we may even ponder: Why is my [relative/friend] disengaged from their life-saving treatments yet passionately loyal to unproven supplements?

While we become more empowered and digitally connected than ever before, the pharmaceutical sector finds itself struggling. How can it keep up with wellness brands that speak directly to modern aspirations and values?

I started investigating and found some numbers that tell a compelling story. The Global Wellness Institute (GWI) reported that the global wellness economy reached $6.3 trillion in 2023, up from $4.6 trillion in 2020, reflecting an annual growth rate of about 9%. The industry is expected to continue growing to nearly $9 trillion by 2028. In comparison, the global pharmaceuticals market was valued at $1.66 trillion in 2023 and is projected to reach $3.15 trillion by 2032, reflecting an annual growth rate of only 7.5%.

These figures position wellness as an economic giant, already substantially larger than the global pharmaceutical sector. They also signal a fundamental change in how people approach their health and well-being. We set out to dig into this in more detail.

The Cultural Shift: Digital Revolution in Health Decisions

We live in a digital age, and AI has become an integral part of our lives, including healthcare, often serving as the first port of call for many seeking health-related information. These readily accessible platforms provide instant responses to health queries, making individuals feel heard and empowered. The immediacy of AI-generated answers creates a sense of control and understanding, even when the information provided may not always be accurate or complete.

People are more interested in learning more by themselves than consulting a doctor. Wellness brands do exactly that: they aren’t selling products like pharma, they’re selling an identity, value systems, and a sense of belonging.

A 2024 study from the University of Sydney found that almost one in ten participants had turned to ChatGPT for health information. The majority of these users were aged 18-44, and 61% of them specifically asked “higher risk questions related to taking action”; this advice should ideally come from a medical professional.

This digital empowerment represents a double-edged sword. Whilst it democratises access to health information, it also creates what we might call the disastrously empowered patient – individuals who make significant health decisions based on superficial knowledge from AI or quick internet searches. These patients, armed with fragments of information, may feel sufficiently knowledgeable to adjust their prescribed treatments, skip doses, or discontinue medications altogether.

Social Media: The Wellness Amplifier

Social media platforms are transforming health conversations from clinical discussions into lifestyle aspirations. Where pharmaceutical communications tend to focus on symptoms and solutions, wellness brands leverage social media to create emotionally rich narratives that resonate with modern consumers. They romanticise health journeys, turning daily supplement routines into Instagram-worthy moments of self-care.

The wellness market is influencer and advocate-led rather than product-led. "You can be like us" becomes the rallying cry, creating loyal communities of believers who share not just products but entire value systems, fostering a sense of belonging that prescription medications rarely achieve. When someone takes their daily wellness supplements, they're not just addressing a health concern – they're participating in a lifestyle, joining a community, and affirming their identity. 

Our social listening data reveals a stark contrast in tone between discussions focussed on wellness and those focussed on treatments and ailments online. Wellness conversations consistently maintain an aspirational and emotionally rich quality, whilst treatment and pharmaceutical discussions often remain trapped in clinical, even anxious, frameworks. This difference in language creates vastly different engagement levels, with wellness brands achieving the kind of passionate advocacy that pharmaceutical companies can only dream of.

Put simply, Wellness brands focus on what’s possible, not on what is broken.

The Proactive Wellness Philosophy

Looking at it through this lens, health instantly becomes an aspiration rather than a problem to be fixed, a journey of optimization rather than a battle against disease. Wellness has managed to change the story. This proactive approach resonates deeply with consumers who want to feel in control of their “health destiny”.

Wellness brands promise incremental gains and micro-benefits that compound over time. They position themselves as part of a larger health story, not the complete solution. This manages consumer expectations, who, in turn, show remarkable patience and tolerance for underperformance.

The subscription model employed by most wellness brands reinforces this tolerant mindset. Unlike pharmaceutical prescriptions that require periodic doctor visits and renewals, wellness subscriptions create a sense of ongoing commitment and personal investment. According to Omniconvert, via a Recharge-led study of subscription merchants, 45% of wellness subscribers are still active after six months – a retention rate that many pharmaceutical adherence programmes would envy.

This patience and forgiveness stems partly from the sense of ownership consumers feel over their wellness choices. When someone actively subscribes to a supplement regime, they become invested in its success. They want to prove their decision right, creating a selfreinforcing cycle of adherence and belief. In contrast, prescribed medications often feel imposed, reducing the patient's sense of control and, consequently, their commitment to the treatment.

The Trust Paradox

Trust in the wellness world operates on entirely different principles than in the pharmaceutical industry. Wellness brands have created what might be called trust machines – ecosystems where trust flows not from clinical trials or regulatory approval, but from the voices of advocates and influencers who embody the brand's vision whilst representing customer needs.

More intriguingly, our research found that wellness brands actively foster "self-trust" in their customers. They congratulate consumers for doing their research, listening to their bodies, and being proactive about their health. This congratulatory tone fuels empowerment, making customers feel like health experts in their own right. The dominant patient voice in wellness conversations online reinforces this empowerment, creating an echo chamber where personal experience trumps clinical evidence.

Looking Forward: The Imperative for Pharmaceutical Evolution

The pharmaceutical industry now faces a critical juncture. The cultural shift towards wellness isn't a passing trend. It represents a fundamental change in how people conceptualise health and their role in managing it.

This doesn't mean abandoning scientific rigor or clinical evidence. 

What it does mean is learning to speak the language of modern patients, understanding their aspirations, and meeting them where they are culturally.

It means making sure that patients like my mother feel in control of their prescribed meds, see their progress, and have a sense of belonging.

And it means recognising that in an age of digital empowerment and social media influence, the old models of doctor-patient communication may no longer be sufficient.