Changing Fitness Landscape: Signal or Noise for Supplement Brands?
The fitness world has always been fast-changing, but did the life-altering last few years create additional opportunities for supplement brands to focus on endurance activity participants?
Maybe we all want to wipe this from our memories, but it wasn’t too long ago that gyms across the country were closed, bikes (both traditional and stationary exercise ones) were sold out everywhere, and going for a run was one of the few approved ways to leave your home. While these disrupted fitness routines didn’t last forever, they did create a sticky enough imprint that has proven to produce some profound contagion effects.
So, what am I taking about? Are people running more, cycling more, swimming more, and hiking/walking more now? The simple answer is yes…
Endurance Activity is up
Though the following collection of data points [in a vacuum] wouldn’t necessarily be a representative sample of the average person, I think collectively they provide a glimpse into how the pandemic changed the fitness landscape…maybe forever.
Garmin Connect Data = The fitness tracker company, with an estimated 18 million users, it has seen YoY growth in both 2020 and 2021 for running, cycling, swimming, and hiking/walking activity.
Strava = The leading social fitness platform, which is especially popular with runners and cyclists, just surpassed 100 million athletes in May 2022. The company stated in that recent announcement press release that they’ve seen a tremendous shift in the importance of movement and sport in people’s lives, with its members recording 2.5 billion activities in the last 18 months.
Peloton = The leading connected fitness brand had its subscriptions grow from about 886,000 in March 2020 to just under 3 million two years later. The average monthly workout per connected fitness subscriber has also grown from 17.7 workouts to now 18.8.
Zwift = Converging with another “COVID-19 Effect” tailwind, the part-gaming, part-fitness platform, that allows people to race on stationary bikes from their homes, has quietly grown its user base to around 4 million total.
Park Data = The numbers of hikers have skyrocketed, with 135% YoY growth in trail activity. Visitation to the national parks have also increased substantially over the last two years.
RunSignUp = According to the racing event platform, endurance activity participants are also getting more competitive. You had 169% YoY growth in triathlon participants, 25% more marathoners, 28% more 5K and fun run racers, and across all categories overall it’s been up 22%.
As you can see collectively, these numbers provide glimpses into the widespread growth across endurance activity type, interest, and competitive level.
But, before I shift into what this could mean to the supplement industry, I wanted to give a quick shoutout to the sponsor of this content, NuLiv Science. Over the last 25 years, NuLiv Science has grown into a leading full range ingredient supplier, early-stage developer of nutraceuticals, and a trusted turnkey service provider to the dietary supplement industry.
That includes helping brands targeting the endurance sports market. By deploying a unique fermentation technology, NuLiv Science can grow high quality Cordyceps sinensis mushrooms for its patented ingredient known as CordycepsPrime. This parasitic mushroom has been used in China for thousands of years as a tonic for energy, vitality, endurance, and supporting a healthy immune system.
If you’re interested in obtaining more information around why brands are formulating with NuLiv Science ingredients to take their products to the next level, head over to NuLivScience.com or reach out to me directly and I’ll connect you with the relevant team member.
Adjacent “COVID-19 Effect” Tailwinds
Whether its race signups, connected fitness equipment platform stats, wearables activity data, and/or anything else is able to tell the whole story about the changing fitness landscape, let’s open the aperture a little bit and just consider how drastically different the world looks because of the coronavirus pandemic. I could list numerous ways that human behavior has changed…and arguably this all blends up into a net-positive tailwind for what I’m talking, but just think about how 4x more people can now work from home compared to pre-pandemic. Then, think about the subsequent time savings that is caused when you eliminate a daily commute. Yes, we’d be ignorant to believe that all (or even most) humans reverted that extra free time into workout time, but we must imagine that some percentage did begin their fitness journeys because the pandemic granted them time to start it.
Physical Gyms Dead?
Are these new entrants rushing to get a traditional physical gym membership? The probability is low, as the global health and fitness association states the total gyms in the U.S. have fallen by 25% since 2019. That being said, physical gyms will not disappear, just as connected fitness isn’t the absolute answer either. Each environment does a different job. Change has absolutely happened in the fitness space, though it might not be the “death of physical gyms at the hands of connected fitness” rhetoric we heard about throughout 2020.
So, how are all these new entrants exercising?
Look no further than the most popular forms of exercise that continue to be walking, running, and cycling.
Supplement Industry: Signal or Noise?
For supplement brand owners (especially those positioned in the sports nutrition niche), your next step is assessing if this potential leading indicator of long-term change justifies a strategic action. That’s because chasing every single trend (even an extremely tempting one) is not the answer, especially when it doesn’t align with your current brand strategy or upcoming rebrand. But, let’s assume that taking advantage of the trending endurance opportunity does make sense for your sports nutrition brand.
I’m going to rundown a few key areas that must be considered:
How will you support these consumers?
What’s your sales channel strategy?
New product development
I’ll start with some thoughts around supporting the endurance consumer…
For decades, the sports nutrition brands have largely ignored endurance activity. The easiest way to see what I’m talking about is take a quick glance at the Instagram feeds of leading sports nutrition brands. What did you see? It’s mostly media that’s inside of a traditional gym, right? Where are the sports nutrition brands talking directly to walkers, runners, cyclists, swimmers, etc.? Where are the demand and conversion driving marketing assets to support it? Where are the sports nutrition brands saying we are here for you…we are you?
There are a few sports nutrition brands that match what I’m talking about, but I want to initially bring up a brand that we can see tangible financial performance for because they are a publicly traded company.
Science in Sport describes itself as a performance nutrition brand that provides optimal solutions across the nutritional need states of energy, hydration, and recovery. That could apply to several exercise modalities, but what you see on social media is a lot of endurance activities. They have been around 30 years supporting endurance athletes. They also reported 30% sales growth in its latest annual earnings. So, to me it looks like authentically penetrating the cultures of those sports and being positioned within the endurance trend can result in positive financial outcomes.
What happens though if your sports nutrition brand doesn’t have the same long legacy of reaching endurance athletes…how can you pivot?
A great case study would be the sports nutrition brand Bare Performance Nutrition. When it launched in 2012, founder Nick Bare was focused on mostly bodybuilding and naturally his sports nutrition brand followed along with his personal interests. That pursuit continued for a handful of years until 2018 when Nick Bare completed his first marathon. Since that timeframe, Bare Performance Nutrition has successfully blended more endurance sports into its marketing, and it’s also influenced product development.
An important point to bring up is that Nick Bare has also become a sizable fitness influencer over the last decade. This helps him attract a likeminded community regardless of his changing fitness passions. Maybe you aren’t a front-facing charismatic entrepreneur that participates in endurance sports and is willing to put your life out on social media. I totally get it, so leveraging influencer marketing becomes even more important when you’re pivoting your sports nutrition brand.
Partnering with individuals that are known in the endurance world is a must have strategy when you consider the challenging sales channel landscape. Outside of ecommerce, where does the average endurance activity participant shop? You have specialty retail, but its either the massive dispersion of independent shops (which is extremely tough to sell into efficiently) or smaller store count that makes it a bit of a destination trip. Taking this a step further, supplement merchandising in those retailers is usually not in the most desirable high-traffic areas. I wish I had good news in terms of the sales channel challenge solving itself in the near-term (if ever), but I tend to believe that all long tail merchandise is best suited for online anyways. That’s why you even see specialty supplement retailers like GNC and The Vitamin Shoppe stock most endurance products only online.
Since we are talking about products, it’s important to understand that most endurance activity participants likely won’t be attracted to the bigger, faster, stronger product marketing mentality. Performance has long been the foundation of sports nutrition. That being said, I’d argue that this historical focus has incrementally become more disconnected from the average supplement buyer psychographics. Even in a gym environment, most people are not there to build muscle or increase sports performance. They are there for general wellness reasons. This is similar to someone sweating on a peloton bike. It’s very likely they won’t be looking to break records in the next 100-mile road race in town. So, while sports nutrition products could provide benefits to the endurance athlete, it’s about meeting the consumer where they are right now.
From a product perspective, that means purchasing volume is still mostly in the hydration, protein, energy beverage, nutritional snacking, and carbohydrates categories. That’s not to say you should (or are required to) formulate products that lack any semblance of innovation. Just make sure you consider the strong correlation in the functional CPG categories between innovation and education, and it’s the other aspect of meeting the consumer where they are right now. How do you translate ingredients known in bodybuilding into language understood by endurance athletes? A content marketing delivery trend that might bode well for education stems from TikTok. Just look at how important that social media platform has been to popular sports nutrition ingredients like creatine.
Final Thoughts
More than ever, humans are beginning to realize that movement is an essential component in quality of life. In my opinion, endurance sports (regardless of the level), continue to grow as the fitness/wellness link strengthens. Sports nutrition brands will have to recognize that the market is less concerned about increased performance and more about health, longevity, immunity.
Are you willing to look past the challenges caused by this market evolution and see its massive opportunities?