The complex consumer

No longer one trend, but three

Clearly, the health and wellbeing trend is the most powerful driver shaping the soft drinks market at present. But to make life more complicated for the industry, that trend is itself fragmenting. Increasingly, health and wellbeing means different things to different people.

For example, 83% of the population want to live a healthier lifestyle – only 17% say they have no health concerns. Back in the ‘90s, this would have driven a straightforward pursuit of the latest diet fad: low fat, low salt, or low sugar. But these days a healthy lifestyle doesn’t look so simple.

A 2007 Nielsen survey of attitudes to health identified three distinct concerns:

• Naturalness (addressed by nine of the top 20 new product launches in 2007)
• Functional benefits (something added, addressed by seven of the top 20 new launches in 2007)
• Diet (something removed, addressed by two of the top 20 new launches in 2007)

Those diet factors are still important to some consumers, but the dominant preoccupation that has emerged recently is maintaining a sense of health and wellbeing through naturalness. In 2007, 69% of people said they “prefer foods that are natural” – compared to 50% in 2000. This is causing some people to strike different balances – recognising that low-sugar is not the only health option, for example by trading-off the perceived naturalness of alternative drinks against their calorie content.

At the same time, consumers are responding to the prospect of gaining health through functional benefits. Hence the rise of probiotics as a mainstream sector. One in nine shopping baskets now contains a probiotic, and big grocery brands like Flora Pro.activ are successfully extending into this space.

So where does this leave diet and no-added-sugar drinks? For years they have been steadily increasing their share of the soft drinks market, and in 2007 they continued to grow on-premise sales. But in the take-home market it was a different story, as the long growth trend slowed. Two years ago, diet/no-added sugar drinks’ share of total soft drink sales value was 24% and rising; now it is down to 22%. Consumers are taking a step back from the idea that health is all about denial. While dieting still plays an important role in their lifestyles, they are recognising different approaches to healthy living. Dieting and denial are giving way to balance and moderation.

So consumers who might previously have considered switching to diet or no-added sugar variants may now prefer to drink regular variants as part of a more holistic healthy lifestyle. In the quest for naturalness, few consumers are willing to make compromises on taste – but more will make compromises on sugar content, accepting that sugar is a natural ingredient, particularly in fruit-based products. Hence, for example, the rise of smoothies, now selling three times faster than two years ago.

For the foreseeable future, then, diet and regular look set to co-exist. Sometimes in the same shopping basket – because another pattern emerging in consumer research is that what we think isn’t necessarily what we drink.

Take, for example, those 69% of consumers who say they prefer foods that are natural: 37% of them buy a diet cola which contains artificial sweeteners. When faced with such a fragmented picture of what’s healthy, it seems we’re sometimes led by our heads, and sometimes by our hearts.

Given that everyone in the country is exposed to much the same messaging from the media, marketers and industry regulators about health and naturalness, you might expect attitudes to be broadly similar across the UK. But in fact, there are distinct regional differences (see map below).

The desire for naturalness is strongest in the South of England – and weakest in the North East, where consumers are most likely to be looking for functional benefits or diet options. The most balanced consumers appear to be in the West Midlands.