The Familiar Ingredient(s)

Supplement trends are moving faster than ever before. Consumers are discovering new health information faster. Tiktok, Reels, Podcasts etc. We are in the age of Huberman:

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But sometimes, a little familiarity is what consumers really crave, though they may not acknowledge it at first. Let’s break it down.

We still have a fairly classic adoption curve for new ingredients, even with the acceleration we are seeing from social media.

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One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that often to get people to buy your newer, better formula for a given benefit, you need to include an ingredient from further down the adoption curve to familiarize it to them. To a scientific purist, this will be hard.

Vitamin C - the OG supplement

A good example is with immunity.

It’s a highly complex multivariate “problem” to solve. New research is always viewed with skepticism initially.

For customers who are already buying the category, getting them to switch from their existing product will be tough, especially if it has been part of their routine for years.

So sometimes you have to cave, and go find an “old school” ingredient that is ubiquitous, and include it. Vitamin C. It’s been used as a supplement since the mid-1900s, and gained steam ever since.

Emergen-C was wildly successful with their big “1000mg” claim on the front of their packaging. How do you convert an Emergen-C customer to your new product? Match that hero claim of theirs, and then improve the product with your more up to date ingredients.

Usually, those ubiquitous ingredients are quite cheap to include in your formula and they give you baseline credibility with customers who already have it in their routine. This then opens them up to some of the ingredient stories you might be telling about relatively newer things. Elderberry. Mushrooms. You get the idea.

Sleep Trend Cycles

Another example is sleep, and this is a category that is undergoing change as we speak. In 2020, if you were designing a sleep supplement, you almost certainly needed to add melatonin into it to get it to move off the shelf. That was the most well known sleep ingredient. It had a feedback loop. People who were interested in the category were looking for it.

But in 2024, things have changed. There’s been a backlash against melatonin. It’s still relatively early in its journey but will certainly grow.

Now if you’re designing a new challenger brand with a sleep product, you likely will NOT want to include melatonin. This will make you stand out more against the products that came before, and aligns you with the ingredient stories being told by trusted influencers, who are largely anti-melatonin at this point, at least for daily use.

Closing Thoughts and Questions

So as you design your new supplement product, think about your audience. Are you designing it for a purist, early adopter audience who are at the bleeding edge of supplementation? Or are you trying to get some of the customers who are later to adopt new things? Should your formula change over time as ingredients move down the adoption curve?

These are all good questions to tackle head on before you launch ideally, as it helps you get tight on your customer and get to product market fit faster.