How Brands can make the pursuit of health simple, effective, and joyful for all

As our society gets increasingly unwell, it’s vital for us to take a prevention-first approach towards health. Prevention is not something that is accessible for most people, nor something that the medical economy is incentivized to promote. The key to preventing chronic illness and improving the health of 1 billion people this decade, is making it simple, effective, inclusive & joyful by unleashing the collective power of consumer BRANDS.

If you asked the average person whether being healthy is a right or a privilege, the answer would more than likely be a right.

For the 1%, preventive health is accessible, personalized, holistic, and elegantly designed. Yet, as a society, we’ve made it into something that’s unattainable, and largely unaffordable for the vast majority. While health should be about doing the basics well, the everyday decisions, we’ve made it far more complicated than it needs to be.

So how have we ended up where we are?

The reasons are multi-fold. The first has to do with incentives.

An oft-cited reason is that approximately 90% of the US health budget is spent via a fee-for-service reimbursement structure, which incentivizes volume and complexity of interventions. At the outset, this logic seems reasonable: one should only receive, and therefore pay for an intervention if needed. The problem, of course, is this system does not account for, nor incentivize approaches to prevent the disease from happening in the first place, thus obviating the need for these costly interventions.

Now imagine you find you have a higher risk for early onset Alzheimer’s disease. The actions you take today to prevent this are far more important to the eventual outcome than any downstream pharmacologic intervention; yet prevention is significantly under adopted at a population level because it is not incentivized, nor correctly promoted. 

Then, there’s how consumers are oversaturated with messaging that associates health with the unattainable and unaffordable, from perfect-looking influencers to marketing-led expensive shortcuts.

So, how can we make personalized prevention the norm, and restore everyone’s rightful pursuit of health?

The status quo is not working for prevention for the average consumer, so the solution has to be unconventional in approach.

Unleash is unconventional.

This unconventional approach to scaling personalized preventive health via our Prevention-as-a-Service™ platform is what gives us confidence that we will improve the health of 1 billion people by 2033, if not earlier. Previously, I shared the origins and triggers for an unwavering commitment towards this mission, much of the how is captured in our values.

I’m going to tell you HOW we are doing it.

Principle 1: Make health the present

Health is nothing more than the sum of our everyday decisions – a continuum. It’s about doing the basics right. Instead, we’ve made it overcomplicated and inaccessible.

Today’s consumption of health is binary; we are either healthy or sick. This is largely the product of today’s medical economy, which has a sole focus on disease.

There is a reimbursement code for managing obesity, managing diabetes, managing heart disease. And so the healthcare mission is diabetes care or obesity management, culminating in an ever growing 10+ trillion dollar global healthcare spend. Staying sick has almost become easier than keeping healthy.

Even the definition of prevention within the medical economy is largely skewed towards secondary prevention, i.e. screening and detection. These are very important, but true prevention deals with the upstream causes of disease – the everyday behaviours and social determinants.

I’ll give you a personal example. Back in 2016, my 23andMe genetic test showed that I have one of the two gene variations that are more closely connected to developing age-related macular degeneration (AMD). AMD is something that I am very familiar with, having seen my grandmother lose her sight and independence. What happens next is all to do with prevention and nothing to do with pharmacological interventions. The path forward requires focusing on fitness, nutrition, rest and self-care.

Prevention is mostly a silent hero. While TikTok was hosting the Ozempic Oscars, scientists at the University of South Australia, led by Professor Carol Maher, were quietly demonstrating that exercise as an intervention for improving depression and anxiety is 1.5 times more effective than either medication or seeing your psychologist.

Sadly, these kinds of stories are invisible in culture and media – because preventive health gets no money, at least in comparison to the funding afforded to products and services for once people are already sick. Because preventive health happens day to day, not in a clinical trial setting. Because preventive health hasn’t to date been terribly convenient compared to a pill or injectable. And above all, because preventive health doesn’t follow the PR narratives we know how to interpret - it’s showcasing people staying the course or improving from a solid baseline, rather than miraculously recovering or reversing steep declines.

Principle 2: Pursue radical inclusivity

Plenty of research has linked prevention to better health outcomes. Yet, for that to work for our society as a whole, we need it to work for everyone.

Everyone is the key word here.

Because while preventive health is not a new concept, and products like smart watches, smart rings, smart bikes and smart mirrors, weight loss and mental health apps, and personalised supplements based on gut microbiome tests are great innovations, they’re out of the realms of affordability for most people, and in particular the populations which stand to benefit the most.

Not only that, but by the time people get to the stage of buying these products, they’re already looking after their health to some degree, and seeking the next level. There’s a selection bias towards the already healthy, while the people who really need help with their health are never being targeted with solutions. 

I often echo that today's preventive health solutions are built for those who need it, but used by those who don't.

At Unleash we believe everyone should be able to access personalized preventive health. Full stop. Not just the ones who can afford it or live in places designed for it. Or even those who know what it entails today. We celebrate diversity and are for the 99%, because everyone has a right to health.

Principle 3: Put the joy back in health

When it comes to health, we’ve been conditioned to think of it as ‘sick care’ – health has lost its joy. Already, there’s ample evidence to show that people are sensing this fact, and hence Gen Z – who make up a third of the population – are taking to TikTok & Instagram for health information. Open any of these social media platforms on any given day and you’ll see countless posts on health-related topics like diet and exercise. With TikTok & Instagram filling a communication gap, especially for younger empowered users, it is tempting to think that therein lies an opportunity.

And while TikTok might show that people are understanding the need to democratise access to health information, it’s also extremely problematic in its lack of credibility. More often than not, TikTokers are not accredited professionals offering rigorous, scientifically backed advice. Most advice is at best questionable, and at worst harmful. A recent article in The New York Times highlighted a study which found that nearly two-thirds of the 100 most popular fitness influencers lacked sound advice or posted content that could negatively affect people’s mental and physical health. 

However, there’s no reason it has to be this way – it can be both scientifically credible, individually relevant and joyful.

We need only look to the way BRANDS use joy to build loyal followings and shape consumer behaviour - Phil Knight’s love for running became Nike for example – to really understand the power of positivity to influence behaviour.

However, joy should not be forced through marketing.

The answer is not paid triggers, which merely acquire customers for the short-term. You only need to look at the numbers to see this – the global fitness industry alone is worth $1 trillion, and yet 60% of adults in the US aren’t active enough and 50% of the US population is expected to be categorized as obese by 2030.

Instead, it’s about engaging internal triggers which bring people on health journeys. Personalized journeys trigger joy and lead to action. It gives people motivation and the ability to take positive action for their health. At Unleash, one-to-one brand-consumer connections are built through unique experiences that are engineered to deliver measurably more joy and health the world over – because if it’s not fun, forget it. 

Principle 4: Build on consumer-brand engagement

Experiences that measurably improve the health of 1 billion people must tap into the drivers of human motivation, such as belonging, progression, wanderlust, identity and winning.

Who is best placed to do this? Your BRANDS.

People look up to them, feel inspired by them. It’s our belief at Unleash that no one is better placed to change the narrative around personalized preventive health than BRANDS. It’s through the cultural value and desirability of BRANDS that prevention also becomes culturally valuable and desirable.

BRANDS are poised to change behaviour due to their deep understanding of the consumer journey, their everyday presence and influence, and aligned incentives with healthy consumers. Just ask yourself, who is incentivized for me to wake up every morning feeling great? Your favourite trainer at Planet Fitness or your local pharmacy? And yes, Starbucks is better positioned to drive outcomes in our lives than most health insurance companies, because Starbucks is integrated into the fabric of our lives. On® running shoes or Lululemon® yoga mats can be more influential in shaping our health behaviours than physicians pushing people to lose weight or improve their blood pressure.

It’s how preventive health becomes the hero it needs to be. And how it competes in a world where more and more sources are telling us all we ‘need’ is just one expensive weekly injection to be healthy.

At Unleash we harness that impact.

We believe to do anything well, we need to do it together.

That’s why we unleash the power of collective brand action towards our own health, the health of our communities and that of our planet. With Unleash, BRANDS move to the forefront of a healthier, happier and more sustainable future and simultaneously deepen their customer loyalty, build emotional connections, activate their communities, & above all stand out in culture.

What now?

These four principles form the basis of our values here at Unleash Health: Health, Inclusivity, Joy, Community and Planet. It’s at the core of the Prevention-as-a-Service™ model that we’ve pioneered, with a vision of making personalized preventive-health attainable for every human on Earth.

This new frontier in consumer-brand engagement is Prevention-as-a-Service™.