A Return to Relevance

With that goal in mind, Nature’s Sunshine engaged Pure Branding in 2018 for a full brand restaging process; this included the Brand Opportunity, Brand Strategy, Market Research, and Content Strategy phases. At that time, Nature’s Sunshine had no illusions about their brand predicament. “During one of our first meetings, we heard Nature’s Sunshine called ‘the brand that time forgot,’” said Pure Branding’s Yadim Medore. “It is refreshing to enter a process where management is sober to the truth and open to change.”

As is often the case with legacy brands in the supplement market, the brand’s meaning and mission can be lost over time.

As is often the case with legacy brands in the supplement market, the brand’s meaning and mission can be lost over time. In fact, if one were a consumer looking into Nature’s Sunshine’s history, the only thing of note one might walk away with is that it was the first company to encapsulate powdered herbs, such as capsicum. That was its claim to fame, but there had to be more.

The Pure Branding team started its work on the Brand Opportunity phase of the engagement. This phase included an intake and gap assessment, in which Pure Branding reviewed all past brand and marketing materials, sales data, and news and annual reports. They interviewed more than 30 key stakeholders, including cofounder Kristine Hughes, as well as executives, directors, and managers in all departments, including sales, marketing, manufacturing, research and development, human resources, and finance. They also interviewed key educators and distributors in the field. As Pure Branding’s Peter Littell stated, “We knew going into the rebrand there would be a wealth of history waiting to be revealed. We were excited when, during our interview process, the authentic core of the brand began to emerge.”

The passion and heart of the brand was living within its membership, but it appeared that the company was not capitalizing on this energy. The brand had been reactive and, at times, unfocused. The new leadership wanted to change that. “We knew we had to boldly transform our business,” said Moorehead, who was appointed Nature’s Sunshine’s CEO in 2018. “That meant we had to reestablish our relevance.”

Brand Opportunity Workshop

Following its comprehensive intake, Pure Branding facilitated a three-day Brand Opportunity Workshop of two dozen leaders who represented all internal and external Nature’s Sunshine teams. It was during these days of collaborative and intense give-and-take that the opportunity for the future of the brand began to take shape.

Alignment was reached on these key opportunities:

• The organization was so much more than the first to encapsulate—it was the first to make herbs accessible. It was an explorer brand that had championed a nationwide community of herbal enthusiasts. By returning to its core belief in the healing power of herbs to change lives, it could find its true north. The brand could now passionately champion its heritage, making the belief in the power of herbs exciting and relevant to today’s market.
• The brand had lost its innovative roots. It was not in touch with the changing consumer landscape and the key trends that were driving growth: organics, social media, transparency, mobility, personalization, a growing interest in complementary and alternative medicine, and a shift to a multichannel world where shoppers are not channel-loyal but channel-agnostic. To make its products relevant to the modern world, it needed a call to adventure and a celebration of its authenticity through story and language.
• From a channel standpoint, Nature’s Sunshine was perfectly positioned to be flexible in a multichannel world. It had a rich history of building confidence with its members and opening new territories. It had a strong network and an enviable track record of helping people—it just needed to adapt to new ways of engaging with consumers.

Most important was the unanimous recognition that Nature’s Sunshine had to not only get to know its customers again but also discover who its new customers could be. That could only be accomplished in the next step in the engagement, consumer segmentation research. “In order to re-establish our relevance, we knew we had to first adapt to keep up with evolving market and consumer expectations,” said Eddie Silcock, Nature’s Sunshine executive vice president and president North America. “Our collaboration with Pure Branding helped us in our pursuit of better understanding who our customers are and what they want from us.”

Know Thy Consumer

“The consumer market research phase was one of the most extensive we have ever done,” said Littell. “We conducted quantitative interviews with over 2,000 Nature’s Sunshine practitioners, retailers, and members, and over 1,000 supplement and herbal users. That made for data with margins of error of +/- 2%, providing a rigorous level of certainty in the validity of the findings.”

The study was attitudinal in its approach. It questioned what was driving people to herbs or Nature’s Sunshine. It uncovered consumers’ concerns and beliefs, such as what they care about, who influences them the most, and what they look for in a health and wellness brand. “This approach was key because it tells us what is important beyond the immediate need,” said Medore. “So many companies focus on the need and not the brand. Because there are thousands of products that are made with similar herbs, how does one differentiate which brand is the one they want to use? That is why aligning to their attitudes, behaviors, and motivations is so important. And when looking at our goal of appealing to new and younger consumers while staying true to existing customers, we needed to find out what was compelling to them both.”

With over 3,000 consumer quantitative interviews completed, Pure Branding was able to apply a rigorous segmentation analysis to the data set, identify multiple clusters through the Bayesian information criterion in latent class analysis, and then validate PureSegments™ for both Nature’s Sunshine’s existing customers and US herbal supplement consumers as a whole.

The executives at Nature’s Sunshine were surprised by the study’s results. “What was exciting for us was what was discovered,” said Nature’s Sunshine executive director of global marketing, Tom Fourt. “There was much about Nature’s Sunshine that was relevant to and resonated with younger consumers, and the research revealed a way to update the brand without sacrificing its authenticity and trust. Strategically, we saw we could move forward as a brand that provided consumers with an opportunity for self-expression. We could be the brand that shares the beliefs and values of our customers, who want to be part of like-minded communities who cherish similar ideals.”

New Strategic Direction

The next phase was to define the new strategic direction, focusing on the brand center, communication platform, brand attributes, and more.

Pure Branding conducted a strategic workshop with Nature’s Sunshine’s leadership and its marketing team. During these lively discussions, a brand center was formed that became the centerpiece for Nature’s Sunshine’s new rebrand. “This powerful collaborative work was pivotal and essential to clarifying who we are now,” said Moorhead. “It established the who, what, how, and why of Nature’s Sunshine. It put a stake in the ground that why we are here is to make the healing power of nature accessible to everyone. It identified our brand attributes of being passionate, innovative, responsive, and empowering. It guided our voice and visual language. At the end of the session, we knew who we needed to talk to and how we were going to do it.”

Bringing the Strategy to Life

“Our strategic work always becomes the critical foundation for all brand expression going forward,” said Medore. “Nature’s Sunshine’s in-house marketing team and external marketing partners brought specific talent and expertise in leveraging our strategy and research as they moved into tactical expression and marketing activation. Nature’s Sunshine skillfully embraced this activation process, and seeing how the brand appears now in market is impressive.”

To succeed, Nature’s Sunshine needed a construct of how it would communicate the new brand strategy to its target consumers. To that end, Pure Branding collaborated with Nature’s Sunshine’s team to develop a communication map, complete with the brand’s deeply held beliefs, the why of the brand, the brand attributes, the strategic pillars of its conscious natural sourcing, its scientific approach to herbalism, and its dedication to supporting everyone’s herbal journey. Also in the map were the reasons to believe that validated the new brand positioning. Pure Branding also facilitated a week-long content workshop with Nature’s Sunshine’s in-house copywriting team to develop the brand voice in the context of real-world marketing communications. “As we executed the new brand design and digital marketing, we stayed true to the strategy,” said Fourt. “The foundational work that we had done with Pure Branding proved invaluable.”

“To see how Nature’s Sunshine expresses itself today, and where it was a couple of years ago, is remarkable,” said Moorehead. “Pure Branding helped us define a new brand that is more relevant, aspirational, and empowering, one that transforms the way people think and feel about our company. When you visit our new website, you can feel our passion in the words, imagery, and new packaging. You can understand what we mean by empowering you to be a force of nature. You can see how exploration and discovery are in our DNA. You can appreciate our commitment to what matters to consumers: transparency, sustainability, personalization, and the power of nature to heal.”

The second quarter of 2021 delivered the largest sales in the 49-year history of the company and marks the fourth consecutive quarter of net sales over $100 million. “The global response to our new branding has been tremendous,” said Moorehead, “with feedback reinforcing our initial findings that it not only energizes existing customers, but it’s also more attractive to new customers.”

“The response from our long-time customers has been exceptional,” said Silcock. “ We are on the road to relevance. Our customers feel heard and validated. They feel for the first time in many years connected to our mission, and they are as excited as we are to bring in a whole new generation of people passionate about the healing power of nature.”