+ The Future of Health & Wellness: 4 Scenarios

Asking yourself “What If?” can be a powerful tool for looking into the future. We’ve created a few scenarios that paint a picture of the future of health and wellness along a variety of very different paths. Some of them might seem farfetched, but use them as stimulus for disruptive, innovative thinking. No matter what you come up with, stranger things have happened. Ask yourself how your organization, friends, or family would respond. Create your own scenarios.

This is the third of three parts of our Health & Wellness analysis. Be sure to take a look at the first two parts:
5 Health & Wellness Consumer Archetypes
5 Trends Driving Health & Wellness



Young until I die
Spearheaded by the latest advancements in life science, anti-aging treatments become affordable to nearly everybody in Western economies. The effects are startling.

With the aid of anti-aging treatments, consumers are effectively frozen in time. Baby Boomers always say they don’t feel a day over 30, and now they don’t look a day over 30 either. The treatments are safe, easily administered at anti-aging clinics that are similar to the ones of today, and affordable to anybody with a middle-class income.

Markets quickly change shape in response. Traditional age-based segmentations collapse into three segments: children, adults, and the very elderly. Social dynamics are transformed equally rapidly, changing the playing field dramatically for dating, athletic competition, and other institutions. Even family is affected: parents look the same age as their adult children.



Locals only
In the wake of countless food safety scares, European middle class consumers reject anything not locally sourced, with Americans following closely behind. Only low-income consumers are forced to buy products sourced from abroad, leaving producers scrambling to retool their infrastructure in response. When the dust settles, few of the old guard companies are left in positions of dominance; the majority of marketshare is captured by once-small companies that were able to scale up their operations to meet demand.

Prices rise substantially as a result of rising raw materials costs, but profits stay about the same for manufacturers and distributors. The balance of power shifts in favor of local producers of raw materials and other inputs, who control the resources that consumers demand.



Wellness check
With insurance costs spiraling out of control, and absenteeism and other health-related issues dragging productivity down, employers take action. Employers have run credit checks on prospective employees for years, employers are taking it once step further by running comprehensive wellness checks on candidates.

Unwilling to take the chance of hiring someone that will be sidelined by wellness issues- whether mental, physical, or emotional- employers are demanding access to detailed, private information about your wellness. If they’ll be billing you at an hourly rate, they want to know how many hors you’ll be missing next year from that bad back of yours. They want to know how well you’ve handled stress in the past, if you’ve seen a mental health professional (and why), and how that will affect their bottom line in the future. The net result is that younger, but less experienced candidates sometimes make the cut over a more experienced applicant with potential wellness issues.



The bad old days
Faced with too many products, treatments, services, and fads that promise everything and deliver nothing, consumers reject health and wellness across the board. We look back on today as the peak of health and wellness adoption: from here, consumers slide back into their old habits. They know fast food isn’t great for them, but at least they understand it. They know they should be exercising, but without any idea of where to start, they just give up and do nothing.