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"We ran the numbers and eventually realized that wellness was the future"

"We ran the numbers and eventually realized that wellness was the future"

Ophelia Yeung & Katherine Johnston, Senior Research Fellows at the Global Wellness Institute, are the people defining the $4.4 trillion Wellness industry

Noa Gadot | 10:04, 10.11.22

“The Global Wellness Summit was founded in 2007 by Susie Ellis, chairman and CEO of the Global Wellness Institute (GWI) and was an event for the spa industry. Back then, the industry was booming and yet, there was very little data,” said Katherine Johnston, Senior Research Fellow at the Global Wellness Institute, speaking to CTech in a joint interview with Senior Research Fellow Ophelia Yeung.

“Ophelia and I worked at a Stanford Research Institute and we were tasked with creating the first study on the spa industry. We ran the numbers and eventually realized, through the research, that wellness was the future. We noticed that customers were looking for wellness services and Ellis felt we needed to expand how we look at it. So, in 2010, we began the first study ever done on wellness.”

Johnston and Yeung were speaking with CTech during the 16th annual Global Wellness Summit (GWS), the most prestigious conference on the $4.4 trillion business of wellness, which took place in Tel Aviv last week.

Katherine Johnston, Ophelia Yeung and Susie Ellis. Katherine Johnston, Ophelia Yeung and Susie Ellis. Katherine Johnston, Ophelia Yeung and Susie Ellis.

A GWI report released earlier this year showed that the wellness market grew to a record $4.9 trillion in 2019 and then fell to $4.4 trillion in the pandemic year of 2020. The report predicted growth of 10% annually through 2025.

How does one go about defining an industry?

"A lot of the difficulty was not the actual measurement, rather the definitions and there is a discipline involved in the process. For example, what is a spa? In 2008 spas were defined differently by geographic locations. In Asia, spas were defined as a place that offered water treatments, in the U.S. spas were a place that had at least five treatment cabins,” Yeung laughs as she recalls the strange definitions. “We decided to have the most inclusive definition, if the customers think it's a spa then it is a spa. That was how we finally put the controversy to rest.”

Yeung and Johnston then went on to define sectors within the new industry. “Wellness tourism was a whole new exercise. We started with market segmentation and began with LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) and then moved on to early adopters, that is how we began defining the core and the periphery. Similarly to the industry as a whole, we defined wellness tourism by looking at intent and not the destination. There is primary wellness, where the customer goes for the purpose of wellness and then there is secondary wellness, where wellness is not my primary purpose but I will add wellness to my trip. For example, deciding on a hotel based on whether there is a gym at that hotel. This opened a whole new ecosystem for wellness as suddenly hotels with gyms and restaurants offering healthy food could be classified as wellness destinations.”

There are currently eleven sectors in the Wellness industry: Personal Care & Beauty ($955 billion), Healthy Eating, Nutrition, & Weight Loss ($946 billion), Physical Activity ($738 billion), Wellness Tourism ($436 billion), Traditional & Complementary Medicine ($413 billion), Public Health, Prevention, & Personalized Medicine ($375 billion), Wellness Real Estate ($275 billion), Mental Wellness ($131 billion), Spas ($68 billion), Workplace Wellness ($49 billion), and Thermal/Mineral Springs ($39 billion).

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What about sustainability? Is there any data on that industry?

Johnston shakes her head no and Yeung replies, “An industry is not an industry unless people are willing to pay for its services making sustainability really challenging. We found that wellness is a good way to sneak in sustainability, though. Few people are willing to pay extra for sustainability, however, if you market sustainability through wellness it will appeal to more people, for example, using green building materials may reduce your risk for cancer and there is an added bonus of them being good for the environment.”

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