Wellness Expected to Be Next Major Luxury Goods Trend Post-COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed innumerable challenges for business and retail moving forward, and this has luxury goods companies particularly worried.
After enjoying years of robust sales and growth, that has all come to a halt as consumers batten down the hatches to see “what happens next” with the world, the economy, and even society itself.
Naturally, companies aren’t sitting back and waiting to see what happens; rather, they’re trying to anticipate the next big trend in order to get a first-mover advantage.
And it is looking like health and wellness are going to be the way of the future for luxury goods purveyors and the broader market as increasing numbers of consumers of all backgrounds are expressing more concern about their health.
Forbes attributes this to the unique conditions of the pandemic as well as the various realities it has revealed, namely that wealth is no barrier to death from COVID-19 and that preventing disease is a truly all-in effort on society’s part.
Vice president of consumer psychology at research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey explained to Forbes, “Consumption is driven by very strong motivations, like emotion, identity, and social connection. Those motivations aren’t going anywhere. But the values, habits, and norms that shape what we consume and how we consume could shift dramatically.”
It isn’t just health that is going to drive this new trend, either, but rather a broad spectrum of lifestyle-related activities. This could include mental, as well as spiritual well-being.
Forbes also highlights Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in explaining the strategies luxury brands and companies will pursue in a post-coronavirus world.
For those of you not familiar with Maslow’s pyramid, it is a scheme for understanding how humans make choices across a range of areas. At its most basic levels, the need for security and health can end up overriding higher-order needs like self-fulfillment and actualization. In other words, if your consumer is focused on surviving in this new world we find ourselves inhabiting, then they are going to have less time and perhaps even less money to spend on “self-actualizing” themselves through the purchase of aspirational luxury goods and services.
In other words, luxury brands have to pivot towards these more basic needs in order to funnel consumers back up to the top of the pyramid.
“In effect, the coronavirus pandemic has turned Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs upside down. Shopping, even for the affluent, has shifted toward the basics with many affluents for the first time experiencing online grocery shopping,” Forbes writes.
Director of research and public relations at the Global Wellness Institute, Beth McGroarty, further elaborates, “The silver lining in all of this is it brings a lot more focus on health and wellness. Post-pandemic behaviors will change just because people will have adopted new ways to survive, even thrive. It will be a radical check on our blatant consumerism. People have been forced to stop it, and they realize that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make them happier.”