The Opportunities That Exist In The 'Market Of Well-Being': MeQuilibrium's Jan Bruce

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Jan Bruce calls stress the new fat, a preventable reality. But unlike obesity, she argues, stress sneaks up on you,uncaptioned often wreaking havoc that's evident only after it's too late. That's why it's critical that people take control of and limit their stress. Enter meQuilibrium, the company for which Bruce is CEO and co-founder. The stress-management system enables folks to make and track lifestyle changes suited to their health goals.

It's an innovative and helpful technology in a world of wellness-monitoring tools a la FitBit, Nike Fuel and calorie-tracking apps. And while she's seeking to raise the profile of meQuilibrium, she's also trying to do the same for stress and its effects. Beyond that, though, her business and focus speak to the marketing opportunities around the "market of well-being," as she dubs it, and the "consumerization of healthcare."

I caught up with Bruce--the former managing director and publisher at Martha Stewart Living’s Whole magazine and CEO and co-founder of Integrative Medicine Communications--about that recently, and here's what she explained.

Define the 'market of prevention.'

Over the last 30 years consumers have drastically reshaped the agenda around health and wellness. And by the way, huge business have been created by companies that have anticipated this and leveraged it in fitness, in apparel, in vitamins, in spas, for example. I first saw this with fitness, which in the 90s became a daily regimen rather than a recreational pursuit, and then vitamins, herbals, natural and then organics, anti-aging, food as medicine, and now its balance and the mind/body connection. Consumers have made the connection between heath and quality of life, and that has spawned a huge industry--$1.2 billion in wellness products. Consumers now expect food products to be healthy, they expect their footwear to supportive and comfortable, they expect their office furniture to be ergonomic. Products that have the attributes of health, healing, comfort, protection have value to us. We can roll all of that into ‘prevention’ or personal health, or well-being. Whatever we call it, it’s self-directed care,  it's focus on how our lifestyles and behaviors impact our long-term health and longevity.

What consumer insights are driving it?

Consumers shape the trends in health and wellness and there has been a tipping point in the realization that taking better care of ourselves with healthier diet, better sleep, more exercise, and allowing ourselves the time to rest and recharge--all of these things combine to not only improve immediate quality of our lives, but also the quality of our health long term. That's the market of prevention. Consumers get it now so marketers can market to it. Here’s an example: Consumer attitudes about stress are indeed changing. Two years ago so many successful people I know thought stress was good. It helped them get things done. Now that’s changing, and rather quickly, compared with the time it took for awareness about global warming, the health issues associated with industrial food production, even sun damage. This is a trend line more like smartphone adoption than PC adoption.

What are the opportunities it presents for marketers and businesses?

Marketers can jump on this with the power of their messaging. We have many great brands we associate with relaxed, resilient, empowered, self-directed attributes. Let’s have more of that. Marketers can help people change their attitudes and then their behavior around stress by making it aspirational to recharge, to be collected and in control.

What does it need to be called—if not ‘prevention?’

We have indeed a proliferation of terms: quantified self, which is more of a geeky self-measurement/self-awareness movement as one slice of the market. Personal wellness, self-directed healthy or simply self-care. Whole Body is a commercialized version of holistic health. I argue for  "well-being," and here’s my logic: Prevention means you take care not to get sick,  and wellness implies the absence of disease. But you can be well yet at the same time highly anxious about your finances or job security. Well-being, in that sense, connotes a total, holistic, inside/outside, whole-person state of balanced wellness. Healthy lifestyle, or lifestyle management, maybe. I tend to use well-being and wellness right now because it implies more than staying out of trouble, preventing disease, and implies rather moving toward being +10 rather than just neutral or at zero. For marketers, that’s the aspirational and high-ground positioning that will move people in the right direction.

What’s changing about the reality and business of healthcare?

Healthcare is under siege. I think it’s our real fiscal cliff--as it has the power to drive this nation to ruin, not just economically but also in terms of our future potential. Who thinks a nation of supersized, stressed-out people are going to lead in innovation and quality of life? Healthcare--it's an old model, and everyone says with varying degrees of understanding and approval that it’s not sustainable. So it will change, of course.

What's most fascinating and impactful is what I call the consumerization of healthcare. Because healthcare has gotten so expensive increasing all stakeholders – employers, consumers, providers--have a say in the rules. But when consumers have to pay for things, well, that’s a game changer. It opens a Pandora’s Box as employers and consumers get into the game of choosing and directing their options in healthcare. Once we add consumer choice into the mix--we know this story, we've seen what happens: I call it the “Expedia phenomenon.” There was a time when travel was opaque and controlled by several large airline companies and a group of intermediaries, travel agencies. Consumers had to work through them and with them, which limited choice and fixed pricing. Then came online booking and eventually consumer-facing brands that facilitated self-service and choice ( i.e.,Expedia) and now consumers have transparency and opportunity to play the price-convenience angles. And savvy shopping and loyalty pay off.  The same will happen with healthcare. Already you can go to Walgreens and get a flu shot, and in some locations visit a doctor for simple symptoms. The cat’s out of the bag, and eventually consumers will have the same transparency and convenience and price options as with travel, or clothing. As this progresses healthcare products and services will become more consumer-friendly.  You won't be a member of your health plan, you will be a customer, and the customer is always right. Remember that? And customers aren't kept waiting because they can take their business elsewhere, and it’s easy to book online and pay with PayPal, etc. That's how healthcare will evolve. And that where meQ comes in.

Explain what meQuilibrium is and does.

meQ is online stress management that helps people get to the root cause of their stress and dial down their response to it. We do this in a simple highly personalized way, by showing people how to retrain their thinking styles, and it’s proven highly effective. In just 30 days people report lowered burnout, better emotional control, focus and energy. On a five point rating scale, people consistently move up one whole point.

What kind of competition currently exists for the company?

We have two camps of competitors: First, there are a lot of therapists, coaches, mind-body stress-reduction programs and centers. They are great but they aren't scalable and they are too temporary and time consuming. Temporal, too. The other camp, the bulk of the market, is focused on the "end stage manifestation of stress," which means, “You are already stressed so here is how to relax and calm yourself.” These comprise tactics to calm yourself: breathing, yoga, relaxing pictures and music, remedies, even social apps to calm yourself, to track your lack of calm or to pace your breathing. These have a purpose but they rarely solve the problem. meQ is a very new, very simple approach which gets to the root cause of stress. It's like automated digitized therapy, but unlike a therapist it is quick, it is lasting, and it is cheap and convenient. Think of it as the Expedia phenomenon applied to therapy.

What kind of partnerships are you looking to do?

Beyond stress, meQuilibrium creates proactive mental wellness. Why is this important? It's like when we say you need to get your head in the game. Resilience helps you cope with all the stuff life throws at you. All the studies show that stress is the underlying cause for so much of the lifestyle related issues we suffer and the No. 1 inhibitor for sticking with healthy behaviors. People who are stressed don't stick to their diets; they in fact more often overeat and they drink, they don't sleep as well as less stressed people, and they don't work out. So meQ can actually help people do better in all these areas, and we are working with other companies in the fields of  weight management, fitness, anti-aging, parenting. We want to co-market, upsell, etc. with these companies.

We want to align this with other wellness products and services – products all need services to help them with customer engagement, so meQ can be the straw that stirs the wellness drink, so to speak.  We want to support and grow the wellness ecosystem by helping consumers and  marketers get more value with every transaction.  Because awareness and retraining makes a big difference in motivation.

