Advertisers have cleverly coaxed us to supersize our waistlines, while urban planners and a knowledge-based economy have removed the necessity for us to move around. For a fitter future, we’ll need the willpower to reverse these trends.
One future of fitness may be tied to a pill that simulates the body’s response to exercise. Just swallow it once a day and you’ll have a healthy body-mass index, even if you munch chips on your couch from morning to night. Doctors may never prescribe such a pill, as much as you might want it, because they know physical activity and healthful eating habits carry irreplaceable benefits.
That is why I expect the real future of fitness to be one based on exercise and diet. The problem is how to get people to subscribe to that future. How do we create a mass movement toward healthier behavior? I believe it is a marketing problem as much as a medical one. Based on my experience in advertising and marketing, I offer 10 trends and their implications for the year 2020.
The best marketing minds of this generation have made cars more luxurious, but they have also made our foods and drinks more caloric year after year. Starbucks began as a way to enjoy the coffeehouse experience in America. A “tall” (small) coffee at your local Starbucks has just five calories and no fat or carbs. The brilliant inventions of new kinds of coffee experiences led to the glorious drink called the Caramel Macchiato. It features 240 calories with whole milk, 10 grams of fat, and 28 carbs. Suddenly, a coffee break takes on new dimensions for the waistline.
The CEO of Burger King ordered that no fewer than 30 new products would be offered each year. His first new product was called the Enormous Omelet Sandwich; it boosted breakfast sales by 20% and weighed in at an amazing 760 calories.
Implications for 2020: The brilliance of human invention will continue to create extraordinary chances to gain and lose calories. You can’t regulate the imagination, so consumers will have to depend on willpower. This is hard to do as a lone individual, but much easier as part of a tidal movement. Health and fitness promotion will need to draw on the inventiveness of marketing professionals to reverse a dangerously weighty trend in the food industries.
It is a marketing truism that it is easier to get more money from an existing customer than to try and find a new one. In that respect, we have made it easy to go from a 260-calorie hamburger to a 560-calorie Big Mac, because the hamburger buyers already existed — they just got “supersized.”
Despite a public-service campaign that tells you to “avoid foods larger than your fist,” researchers Young & Nestle in The American Journal of Public Health reported the following startling results: “The largest excess over USDA standards (700%) occurred in the cookie category, but cooked pasta, muffins, steaks and bagels exceeded USDA standards by 480%, 333%, 224% and 195% respectively.”
Naturally, the market is filled with new products that must please the consumer to survive. Cold Stone Creamery started in Tempe, Arizona, in 1988 with a new kind of “Super Premium” ice cream. Its interpretation of a chocolate ice cream cup is called Chocolate Devotion and includes not just chocolate ice cream, but also chocolate chips, a brownie, and fudge wrapped into a massive arrangement of caloric wonderment. From a single store in 1988, there are now 1,350 stores throughout America.
Implications: Controlling size and portions of food offerings may require an intervention. Government regulations may require restaurants to provide clearer statements about the calories on menu offerings. There will be more packaging of foods with proper portions for healthy living. It will be an enormous new category. As the future fitness movement accelerates, transparency will be more than a regulation; it will be a requirement by consumers.
There was a time when youth sports meant having some idle time on the neighborhood sandlot. Today, there are fewer school teams, a decline in daily physical fitness class in middle and high school, and a major increase in the intensity and costs of elite youth sports leagues. These leagues operate separately from the school system and cost parents thousands of dollars in fees and a tremendous commitment in transportation and time.
The level of commitment required to participate has led to the need for kids to focus on single sports in order to compete. Some doctors think this phenomenon is behind the epidemic of repetitive stress injuries, as young athletes turn sports into a 365-day-a-year passion.
The other side of this trend, though, is the effect on the average kid. An estimated 70% of young athletes drop out of sports by age 14. And for the vast masses of semi-coordinated folks, sports represents an elite world of competitive frenzy rather than a sustainable fitness regimen and lifelong pursuit of health. This is not the message that sports needs to send at a time of obesity epidemics.
Implications: Physical education must return as a major priority for schools, as research has shown the importance of physical fitness in academic achievement. Tomorrow’s phys-ed classes will focus on maximum exercise in very tight amounts of time and space. The competitive demands of youth sports will continue to accelerate even as social concern about obsessed parents and repetitive stress injuries mount.
The traditional measures of advertising’s effectiveness — reach, frequency, and impressions — begin to take on an ominous dimension when the money promoting broccoli is compared with the amount promoting french fries. According to a number of studies, sugar colas can be traced as a major source of the obesity crisis. When the leading cola companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on commercials, the total becomes extraordinary over the lifetime of a child. Add fast food, sugar-coated cereals, snacks, and beer for adults, and the amounts are truly staggering.
While it is always possible to run commercials with different content next to the big-fat, big-sugar executions, there is absolutely no way to favorably compare the share of voice in the marketplace. And food advertising is often wrapped up in highly effective merchandising strategies, such as movie superhero action figures sold with your food or popular clothing incorporating beverage brands.
The FTC reported in July 2008 that the major food and beverage marketers spent $1.6 billion on promoting products to kids in the United States in 2006. The promotions included the Internet, TV tie-ins, sweepstakes, games, and more. In contrast, investment in nutrition education goes where it may be least effective: classrooms. An Associated Press report reviewing studies of nutrition education programs—on which the federal government spent more than $1 billion in 2007 — found very little success in combating childhood obesity.
Implications: There will be calls for dramatic increases in restrictions on marketing unhealthy foods. Food companies will offer some healthier options. Recent moves in this direction: McDonald’s adds salads and Coca-Cola adds bottled water. The results will be mixed, but it will be a world where consumers have healthy, affordable options with easy access.
Nutrition education programs need to take a tip from advertisers: Go where the audiences are and use the pitches that are most likely to succeed rather than simply revising classroom curricula.
A few decades ago, there were only three major channels on a television screen and no remote controls. Today’s world includes home entertainment centers that rival movie theaters, computer screens that bring the Internet and video games of fantasy sports far more intriguing than the original, and these liquid screen, graphic paradises require little from us but the movement of a few fingers. Recent studies show people entranced by a screen of some kind over 500 minutes a day. And that’s more than eight hours of sedentary living before any recruitment for fitness can even start.
Implications: Technology will continue to make the sedentary life ever more alluring. While there will be innovative products to promote fitness, like Wii, it is ultimately a matter of a person’s willpower whether to use them.
Remember the days of old? Only one vending machine within a mile? And that one needed exact change. Not that anyone would even consider drinking a soft drink in the morning. Today we are a world where vending machines can accept even the most mangled currency, and they await us around every corner, even in public schools.
The same can be said for the sheer number of fast-food restaurants and self-service gasoline snack shops. They have multiplied by the thousands and added caloric breaks by the millions. Ulysses had to pass the Sirens just once in his Odyssey. We pass them several times a day—day after day after day.
Implications: Expect an explosion of restrictions in public buildings and public spaces on the sale of unhealthy products. The average store, though, will feature the latest in both positive and negative products.
Compression as a marketing idea is wonderful in certain consumer categories. Thanks to time compression, I can get my pictures developed or prescription eyeglasses changed in just an hour. The idea of compression becomes a bit more troubling when it comes to space.
Thanks to the rise of real-estate values, architects have found ways to put hundreds more houses into developments. These new designs feature maximum floor space with minimal green space. Parks and sidewalks are designed out at certain price points and presented as decorative ambience rather than as open places for play and recreation. The new world of suburban living is designed around accessibility rather than fitness—driving rather than walking. We have escalator-enhanced shopping malls and walking-restricted golf courses, so we all can gain weight but do so with maximum convenience.
Implications: A countertrend against automobile-dominated habitats is rising in many communities. But while more parks and trails will be required in clustered communities, the return to plentiful land in urban areas is simply not possible. The rise in fitness activities that require little space, such as pilates, will explode in popularity by necessity. There won’t be room for anything else.
Not just leisure activities, but work also has become increasingly sedentary and time-stressed. The brave new world of hypercompetitive global business requires longer working hours. Business Week reports that 31% of college-educated male workers are grinding through more than 50 hours a week at work.
Furthermore, studies show that 40% of American adults are getting less than seven hours of sleep on weekdays, and 60% of meals are rushed. Given that work in general is now far more white collar than blue collar, it is a world of longer work hours sitting in office chairs typing at computers, and fewer parks to visit because of compressed architecture.
In other words, all our brilliant inventions work together to keep us tired and sitting. Being stressed by time makes it harder to make time for unstressing, as stalling membership rates in health clubs and other fitness adventures would indicate.
Implications: Corporations will likely make major investments in fitness programs for their employees, justifying these investments by adding requirements for healthier lifestyles. These requirements will be tested in court, but the final refinements will still support a more fit employee. Yes, you’ll work long hours, but a visit to the gym will be part of your work schedule.
“Age” is the one “inevitable” category to consider in the health and fitness future. People in developed societies are, quite simply, getting older. In 2010, the majority of the population in the United States will be at least 45 years old.
The effects of aging are well documented: metabolism slows, arthritis invades, flexibility declines, and waistlines expand. While this may be true, it does not explain the global increase in obesity. All of the previous trends discussed have contributed to this situation.
Implications: Societies throughout the world are getting older, and low-impact activities like walking, gardening, birding, and swimming will find increasing popularity. The older audience will be one of the anchors for the new fitness movement in 2020.
Yes, there will be a fitness revolution, but it will be low-key and pedestrian in its execution. Whether or not hundreds of millions of dollars are spent marketing broccoli and exercise, the ultimate decision to lead healthier lifestyles will be up to individuals.
Unfortunately, the solution to the obesity crisis lies in the commitment to fitness and the sweat equity and diet restraint that creates a healthy body. It is a commitment that comes from individual determination rather than a catchy ad campaign. But it is, ultimately, our path back to normality.
Implications: We will ultimately exercise more and eat better because it is the societal norm. In the same way that social expectations guide our grooming, language, and dress, so will these norms and expectations quietly govern our general fitness. The epidemic rise in morbid obesity will subside because it is no longer acceptable. That — and not whiz-bang technology — will be the source of the next fitness revolution.
The year 2020 will not dawn on a culture of fitness fanatics. Instead, it will dawn on a general ethic of tolerable fitness through general diet restraint and moderate exercise. It will take an enormous list of both regulations and voluntary adjustments to make it work, but a shared sense of the national need to achieve a moderately healthy lifestyle will be the key to one of the quietest revolutions in history.
John Sweeney is a Distinguished Professor and head of the advertising sequence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His address is School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Campus Box 3365, Carroll Hall, UNC-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599. Telephone 919-962-4074; fax 919-962-0620.