The opportunity is to expand into everyday health and wellness without losing the performance culture that gave the brand its credibility in the first place.
When defining the category of sports nutrition in as few words as possible, it would be fair to limit it to “nutritional support for preparing for, performing in, and recovering from physical activity.” If that were true, then the category would be a tiny percentage of what it is today. We prefer the term performance nutrition because it reflects the goals of all those brands that sell sports nutrition: to go beyond athletes and help people perform at their best by supporting physical and mental energy, strength, endurance, hydration, recovery, and adaptation.
Performance nutrition is a cultural phenomenon that crosses almost every aspect of American life. It is about individualism and community. It is where extroverts and introverts find commonality. It is where science, celebrity, fashion, philosophy, hedonism, the arts, sexuality, politics, technology, morality, psychology, religion and spirituality, the senses, hero worship, trailblazing, extremism, disruption, and more meet food, nutrition, exercise and sports.
Products that were initially designed for a specific sport or performance outcome become part of the daily diet, used simply to quench thirst. An ingredient that was barely noticed becomes a global phenomenon before it is banned for life.
As performance nutrition expands into everyday health and wellness, the challenge for brands is how to reach more people without losing the performance culture that gives the category its juice.
On Any Given Sunday
From a branding and marketing standpoint, the performance nutrition market mimics the professional sports leagues. There are many leagues, divisions, and of course kinds of sports. Fan bases range from the hundreds to the billions. Rich teams get richer, buy the best players from lesser teams, test the ability of league regulators to maintain a level playing field, and dominate the media. Yet, on any given Sunday, a lesser team can surprise with an upset. And this is what makes sports so magnetic, so addictive, and so infuriating.
The multi-billion-dollar performance nutrition market has its own behemoths that are also intertwined with the largest sports teams and personalities in the world. Pepsi’s Gatorade is like the New York Yankees, a global brand that is equally loved and criticized. Red Bull stretches the category even further, blurring performance nutrition with energy, lifestyle and sport itself through its ownership of professional teams. Glanbia Performance Nutrition has amassed a constellation of big players (e.g., Optimum Nutrition, BSN) and makes the claim to be the #1 sports nutrition company in the world, with sales from its more everyday nutrition brands helping to bolster that claim. The lines between sports, performance, lifestyle, prevention, general wellness and even support for chronic illness are faint.
So, what are the examples of any given Sunday in this space? The example I love the most is LMNT. Within a relatively short period of time, LMNT challenged the conventional wisdom around electrolytes with a fervor and not only changed the way people saw sodium but also cast doubt in people’s minds about the actual value of Gatorade. The result was not just a slew of similar brands, but its impact among athletes and everyday exercisers forced the giant to offer hydration booster stick packs of its own.
Brand Lesson
If a brand has focused passion behind its science, challenging conventional wisdom gains attention. But how you challenge it can make or break a brand. LMNT embraced disagreement with the establishment and built its brand by forcing people to choose one side over the other. It turned it into a competition: the lifeblood of athletes. LMNT was going to live or die by its unrelenting commitment to sodium, and by the time it had reached a tipping point of consensus around the science, it was too late for the bigger players to amass a successful challenge. Brands looking for a major upset victory can turn polarization into a branding strategy.
They also leaned into an important behavioral factor. We know from our PureSegmentation study on supplement consumers that the two market segments most drawn to performance nutrition are also most likely to experiment with supplements to see how they will affect them. These segments are also big on researching brands. LMNT gave them the science to research and something new to experiment with.
Welcome to Wrexham
Once upon a time there was a floundering Welsh football (soccer) club in the fifth tier of English football leagues. Actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought the Wrexham club in 2021, and five years later they were in the Championship (second tier). But more importantly, they are a global brand. And how they got there is all about branding.
Instead of just buying a team and investing money, Reynolds and McElhenney involved not just the players but the townsfolk and created a compelling underdog docuseries, “Welcome to Wrexham,” that has been seen worldwide by millions. You don’t have to be a soccer fan to love the series, and while they could not compete head-to-head with the billionaire owners of football, they attracted talent because of their brand, which in turn led to more victories and promotions.
Brands that grow organically from an authentic reason for being are built for long-term success. Skratch Labs was started by an exercise physiologist and a road cycling champion who wanted to make a sports drink for people who hate sports drinks and energy bars for those who hate energy bars. Like Wrexham, they used their connections with elite athletes to introduce the idea of a slow food movement in sports. In the process, they went way beyond just product and marketing to build a loyal community that wants to connect to their story.
Brand Lesson
When competing in a category that rewards spectacle, staying true to the authenticity the brand had with its early adopters can be a brand’s secret sauce. Every brand has an authentic beginning, but it is surprising how quickly or frequently that authenticity is made unoriginal or even lost. When a brand’s audience expands, the temptation is to make the brand more like its new customers. The strongest brands do the opposite. They continue to speak to new customers the same way they spoke to their original community, making the new customers want to become a little more like the brand.
Eddie Cheever
Your first reaction is probably, “Who is Eddie Cheever?” In a nutshell, Eddie Cheever is a former American Formula 1 race car driver, a winner of the Indianapolis 500, the owner of a group of gyms in the Southwest and father to other race car drivers. I met Eddie in the mid-1970s when he was a 17-year-old Formula 2 driver. My job was to help him get some press so he could gain the attention of Formula 1 teams. I set up a meeting with Sports Illustrated, which resulted in a nice article. But what interested me about Eddie was his fervent belief in a vegetarian and dairy-free diet, along with regimented cardiovascular training and karate. No one in his sport was talking about this. Sports Illustrated, in its article, did not think his dietary bent was relevant. Even though vegetarianism was gaining attention, no one was ready to talk about it as an elite performance strategy. Fast forward to today, when diet and specific physical training are all anyone in racing talks about. It is hard to imagine any sports figure today not being taken seriously when talking about their diet or regimen, regardless of their age or their chosen diet (liver anyone?).
When I think about timing and relevance in performance nutrition, I think about the critical importance of strategic positioning supported by market research.
One example that comes to mind is Vega. The co-founder Brendan Brazier, a professional triathlete, developed a plant-based nutritional drink that became Vega. At first, it was a successful niche vegan nutrition brand. It then conducted market research that uncovered the barriers around veganism while also discovering that the real opportunity was in positioning the brand as the clean alternative to dairy or meat protein. With clean plant-based protein as the core, the brand changed positioning, architecture, product naming (Vega One), packaging and visual identity. Double-digit growth ensued, and in 2015 Whitewave bought Vega for approximately $550 million. Since then, Vega has been bought and sold and under its current ownership of WM Partners it has gone significantly deeper into heavy-duty sports nutrition than ever before, while using the “clean, raw” marketing aesthetic of its earliest days.
Brand Lesson
An idea and its relevance don’t necessarily arrive at the same time. Markets change, and research can reveal the language and benefits that allow an existing idea or product to become or remain relevant. A product’s or brand’s relevance and credibility depend on how ready the market is to receive them. When we conducted market research for Country Life’s whey protein, plant-based protein was rapidly gaining momentum. Rather than assuming whey had lost its relevance, the research identified the benefits of whey that still mattered to consumers and could give them a reason to choose it. The product hadn’t changed. The context in which consumers were evaluating it had.
Put Me in Coach
The organizational structure of head coach, assistant coaches and physio/medical/nutritional teams is a given in professional sports. Athletes do what they are told if they want to play. This relationship between coaches and trainers is seen in gyms across the country, with credentialed personal trainers going beyond their physical expertise and advising on and selling nutritional support.
In our PureSegmentation study on the U.S. supplement consumer, we know that of those people who say that performance is the main reason they take supplements, 41% say they follow instructions and take supplements as recommended or prescribed. That is an over-index of 126, indicating the strong connection between performance and following clinical instructions. We also know that of the two market segments most drawn to performance nutrition, both find their personal trainers more influential than social influencers when it comes to gaining knowledge about health.
It is of little surprise that many health practitioner supplement brands have entered the performance nutrition market. Brands like Thorne, Pure Encapsulations and Xymogen all have sports lines directed to athletes and gym exercisers. Our client Xymogen launched NSF-certified Xymogen Athletix soon after our strategic rebranding work for them. This was an authentic brand extension since the owners of the company, the Blackburn family, were all dedicated fitness enthusiasts, running their own gym and maintaining close connections with clinical performance specialists. It fit in perfectly with the brand platform “Choose your expert. Change your health.” and their long-held belief that the best way to support health is by working with a healthcare professional. This expansion was not just a way to reach athletes; it was also a way to support trainers, coaches and nutritionists as they improve the performance of their clients.
Brand Lesson
Performance nutrition may be one of the few consumer categories where being told what to do is part of the appeal. Athletes and fitness enthusiasts are conditioned to seek expertise. Health practitioner brands are uniquely positioned to be the expert for the athlete, which differs from consumer brands that rely on the athlete to attract new consumers. Being the brand used by and trusted by the “coaching and medical staff” is a positioning that is deeply embedded in the performance culture.
Muscle Matters
The history of sports nutrition was built metaphorically on the backs of the Charles Atlases and Joe Weiders of the ’40s through the ’80s. The early muscle heads gave performance nutrition much of its vocabulary: protein, muscle gain, strength, recovery, transformation and supplementation. They created specialty retail, built fitness communities, promoted extreme intensity and celebrated the beauty of sweat.
But as sports and performance nutrition expanded into team sports, endurance, Eastern disciplines and the pursuit of lean rather than massive bodies, many brands moved away from hyper-masculinity and extreme physical excess. It was almost as though the category had become embarrassed by the tribe that created it.
The pendulum has swung again. Maybe it is the influence of WWE and its superstar graduates such as The Rock and John Cena. Maybe it is the emergence of the manosphere. Or perhaps muscle building never went away; it just took a breather from the spotlight.
What has changed is the meaning of muscle. Strength is increasingly connected to metabolic health, functional capacity, healthy aging and even mental acuity. Some are calling it a new performance paradigm. Building and preserving muscle is no longer relevant only to the person standing in front of the free weights. That creates opportunities both for new brands and for old muscle and fitness brands seeking renewed relevance, but only if they understand muscle in its modern context.
Nothing illustrates this better than the reemergence of creatine. Once largely confined to the hardcore end of the gym, creatine is now being heralded for benefits that extend well beyond building bigger muscles. The rise of GLP-1 medications has added new relevance, as concerns around preserving muscle mass during weight loss have brought strength and muscle maintenance into the conversation for entirely new audiences, particularly women. Brands are responding with new forms, clinically studied formulations, flavored creatines and products aimed at audiences well beyond the traditional gym crowd. Its relevance has expanded into healthy aging, cognition and the broader pursuit of maintaining strength over time.
For a performance nutrition company, creatine is something close to a golden goose. Without abandoning the benefit that made it famous, the same ingredient that sits squarely at the heart of traditional sports nutrition can now speak to new genders, generations and needs that extend well beyond traditional athletic performance.
Brand Lesson
As categories evolve, brands can be too quick to distance themselves from the people or products that defined their beginnings. Modernization does not necessarily mean escaping that heritage. The opportunity lies in reinterpreting what made the brand or category relevant in the first place for a new generation and a new set of needs. Muscle never stopped mattering; what muscle means to people changed. Creatine didn’t need to abandon its performance heritage to become relevant to a broader audience. That heritage gives it a credible foundation from which to build trust in its new promises.
The opportunity for established performance nutrition brands is to adapt to the changing culture and give those old roots new meaning.
Hold That Line?
With regard to branding, should there be a line separating performance nutrition from general nutritional wellness? Protein is used by everyone. Electrolytes are drunk throughout the day, regardless of exertion. Creatine is enjoying a revival among the healthy aging and cognition crowd. Practitioner brands have sports lines, and sports brands are members of larger families of nutrition brands.
It comes down to the motivation and psychology of consumers and whether they want a line separating the two or not. That, in turn, raises the question of whether brands want to hold that line. If your motivation is driven by a desire to prevent diminished cognition in the future, a brand promising bigger muscles may not motivate you to take creatine. If your goal is to lift more, stay stronger and make progress athletically, you may be drawn to a brand that embraces that ethos.
For brands, this is not an abstract distinction. It affects positioning, portfolio architecture, innovation and even how far a brand can credibly stretch into new audiences and channels. The question is not simply how many people a brand can reach, but how far it can expand before it starts to mean something different.
Our PureSegmentation research identifies six census-balanced supplement consumer segments whose motivations span acute needs, prevention, wellness and performance. Consumers may turn to the same science-backed ingredients for very different reasons; the brand they choose depends on how well it speaks to those underlying beliefs and motivations.
What distinguishes performance nutrition, however, is what distinguishes sports from everyday life. People choose teams to follow, identify with, and emulate. Sports create tribes, rivalries, heroes, rituals, authorities and shared beliefs. Performance nutrition has the opportunity to do the same. It is about creating a culture as much as it is about improving performance.
The line between performance nutrition and general wellness should not disappear. Performance brands need a line in order to create a team. Yet the boundaries are clearly shifting. New Hope’s 2026 Sports Nutrition & Weight Management Report found that 40% of consumers now use sports nutrition products for healthy aging, compared with just 24% who say sports performance is their primary reason.
The opportunity is to expand into everyday health and wellness without losing the performance culture that gave the brand its credibility in the first place. The strategy is to build a culture that people inside the line passionately believe in, while giving those outside it a reason to cross over and join them.