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What Makes a Supplement Brand a Valuable Investment?
Investable supplement brands are defined less by science alone and more by their ability to translate that science into meaningful demand. While market size reflects need, market share is driven by brand strength. Investors should evaluate a brand’s true growth potential—across organization, offering, trade, audience, and category—using seven key signals that indicate whether it can scale and win.
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Buying, Breaking & Rebuilding Brand Belief after Supplement M&A
Supplement brands are still being bought and sold, but the real story is what happens after close. In supplements, the hard-to-quantify asset is belief, earned through credibility, transparency, and alignment. When integration standardizes the wrong things, belief weakens, growth slows, and the rebuild begins.
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Your Supplement Rebrand is Not a Logo — It’s Change Management
Most supplement rebrands fail not because of design, but because leaders underestimate the organizational change required to make them real. This article outlines four hard truths about rebranding as change management—and why lasting growth comes from alignment, leadership participation, and scalable purpose, not cosmetic updates.
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The Hidden Economics of Trust: How Brand Value Shapes Every Supplement Decision
When we developed our Supplement Consumer PureSegmentation™ Research, we already knew that while price mattered, it was rarely the decisive factor in supplement purchasing. So we set out to learn more — placing pricing within the broader context of supplement behavior, brand switching, trial motivation, and engagement. What we found was a far more intricate web of forces that shaped both first-time and repeat purchase decisions.
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How consumer definitions of “the system” shape supplement brand trust
In our proprietary, census-balanced Supplement Consumer PureSegmentation™ research, we found that how consumers define the food and medical systems largely determines how they feel about them — and about supplement brands. “Declining trust” isn’t one story; it’s many. The real question for brands isn’t whether consumers trust the system, but which version they believe in.
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Beyond the Obvious: Using Projective Questions to Decode Supplement Consumer Values
Projective questions reveal underlying attitudes by asking about something familiar and emotionally resonant. By understanding what people value most in their practitioner relationships, we gain a roadmap for how brands can communicate more effectively — and more distinctively. Because when it comes to brand differentiation, it’s not just about the products. It’s about the experience, the trust signals, and the way people want to be treated.
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7 Transformations Shaping the Future of the HCP Supplement Channel
The HCP supplement channel is undergoing a seismic shift. From omnichannel expansion and tech integration to DTC disruption and the rise of health coach influencers, this article explores seven key trends reshaping the future of practitioner brands—and what it takes to thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape.
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How Philosophical Alignment Elevates Science for Practitioner Loyalty
If the science behind a product line is just the cost of entry, what does a supplement brand need to do to get the attention of its practitioner customers? Our experience working with leading dietary supplement brands across the integrative healthcare space has taught us that the best way to cut through the noise is to develop a communications strategy that focuses on philosophical alignment.
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Shedding Light on the Supplement Customer Journey
Brands often reach out to us asking for marketing support and are eager to put media in the market to drive growth. They know they need to be on the big media platforms, but they often feel unmoored without a clear channel strategy rooted in a larger marketing mission. These insights from our latest census-balanced PureSegmentation™ Research may help clarify the diversity of customer journeys across the supplement consumer landscape.
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Direct-to-Practitioner Supplement Companies: Do Patients Care About Your Brand? (An Updated Perspective)
Today, the average new patient comes into their first visit with an HCP not only with a bag of supplements they’re currently taking but also with self-education and their own perspective on supplements. We no longer live in a world where a patient walks into a practitioner’s office, gets a diagnosis and recommendation, goes to their physical dispensary, and reorders from the practitioner. What does this mean for practitioner supplement brands?
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Overcoming Confirmation Bias in Dietary Supplement Marketing
Supplement brands know they can’t utilize anecdotal health benefits without substantiating their claims. However, reliance on anecdotal data about how consumers view supplements is still prevalent. Peter Littell shares what The Undoing Project can teach us about heuristics and biases, and why data always wins.
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The 12 Most Common Supplement Branding Mistakes
From years of working with leading dietary supplement brands, we know the hard truths you face. While each company has its own unique set of challenges, there is more commonality than difference. From startups to established brands, here are the 12 patterns we’ve seen supplement brands falling into.
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Five Tips for Launching a Thriving DTC Supplement Brand This Year
Ten years ago, the first successful direct-to-consumer (DTC) supplement brands – like Ritual and Care/of – were launched in a landscape that is markedly different than today. How can entrepreneurs succeed within a shifting ecosystem where the cost to acquire and sustain customers is incredibly high?
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The Doctor is In (and Everywhere Else Too): All Practitioner Supplement Brands are Now Omnichannel Brands
The last decade has been characterized by marketplace adaptation. HCP brands, which previously committed to maintaining exclusivity within the HCP channel, now face the imperative of reevaluating their strategies. Brands must now confront the imperative of enhancing their marketing competencies in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) spheres to maintain their relevance and standing in this evolving landscape.
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Understanding the HCP Spectrum of Influence on Supplement Brands: From Vitalists to Pragmatists
Interest and engagement in integrative health and medicine are expanding rapidly. Forty-nine percent of adults believe in the efficacy of many or some alternative medicines and therapies. The practitioner channel currently represents approximately 9% of all US supplement sales, but its influence on the overall sale of supplements is far greater. What HCPs recommend translates into consumer sales. In the changing omnichannel landscape where the lines between consumer and HCP brands are blurring, all supplement brands can improve their business with a better understanding of how HCPs influence supplement purchases.
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Supplement Brand Transparency: Think TV Series, Not Movie
Many dietary supplement brands are under the false impression that becoming fully transparent will take years of time, effort, and resources. They believe becoming fully transparent is like making a major motion picture — years in the making, one all-encompassing story, and expensive. You release it once and hope it makes an impact. However, we advise brands to stop thinking about transparency like their big movie. Instead, we recommend they approach transparency as if it were a television series, metaphorically speaking.
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The Six Costs of Entry for DTC Supplement Brands
DTC e-commerce sales have tripled in the past six years, and analysts predict sales will reach $150–$200 billion in the next several years. It’s clear the DTC trend has hit critical mass, and everyone wants a piece of the pie—including the supplement industry. Although digitally native brands are still enjoying double-digit growth, the days of their domination of DTC e-commerce may be coming to an end as legacy brands ramp up their presence. What does this mean for supplement brands trying to succeed through the DTC channel?
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A Brand Strategy Perspective on the New FTC Guidelines
Pure Branding founder and CEO Yadim Medore was recently interviewed by The Wall Street Journal about the refresh of the Federal Trade Commission guidelines for advertising health-related products. This is the first time in 25 years the FTC has updated its guidelines since its 1998 “Dietary Supplements: An Advertising Guide for Industry.”
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10 Tips for Supplement Personalization Success
Does this sound familiar? A new product experiences year over year dramatic growth relative to overall supplement market growth. The product is dominated by those who pioneered it at first, but then every supplement company wants in. So is supplement personalization the new CBD?
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The Holy Grail of Supplement Brand Loyalty
Supplement brand loyalty is top of mind with most supplement brands. As in all industries, it typically costs much more to acquire a new dietary supplement consumer than it does to retain one, and thus it behooves brands to invest in customer retention programs in addition to acquisition.