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The wellness industry is as weird and wild as ever, with more of us looking to alternative ways to stay healthy and improve our wellness. But while wellness tells us to drink the green juice, shouldn't we be questioning what's actually in it?
Welcome to Wellness, Questioned, a deep dive into our love-hate relationship with the weird and wonderful world of wellness, self-development and spirituality. How do you look after yourself in the age of anxiety? How can you tell what to believe and what's bullshit?
Join us, Katie, a yoga teacher and coach, and Annabel, a writer about wellness, as we explore the world of wellness and self-improvement and learn how to do wellness, well.
[00:00:00] Katie: Welcome to Wellness Questioned, a podcast looking at how to navigate the wellness industry well, hosted by me, Katie Gordon and Annabel Lee.
[00:00:15] Annabel: Each episode we cover a different aspect of wellness and self improvement, looking at ethics, scandals, and red flags.
Hello!
[00:00:23] Katie: We're back.
[00:00:24] Annabel: We're back.
[00:00:24] Katie: What's our topic for today,
[00:00:26] Annabel: Annabel?
Today we are talking about wild wellness marketing, because it's a problem.
[00:00:35] Katie: It's everywhere.
[00:00:36] Annabel: That is one of the biggest areas, I think, where wellness just gets weird and messy and lets people down, exploits vulnerabilities, just there's a lot of problems, I think, in wellness marketing.
[00:00:56] Katie: So annoying, I can't bear it.
[00:00:59] Annabel: As someone that's worked trying to sell wellness to people, like when I was a yoga teacher, and I you know, sometimes I work with other people as well, helping them sell wellness stuff, 'cause I've got a background in marketing PR and now I write about wellness sometimes as a freelance journalist. It's really interesting to me 'cause I think I probably think about this too much, but it's just something that I feel like is a really big part of my job, but also part of my life because I enjoy wellness stuff and I see this and I fall for it and it also irritates me as well. So I've got eight things, red flags, if you like, that I think are some of the biggest issues with wellness marketing, which we're going to chat about.
[00:01:44] Katie: Show me your flags.
[00:01:45] Annabel: Yeah. Flag number one. So I think one of the biggest critiques of wellness marketing is that, Wellness inherently is selling hope. So if there's something going on for you, you've got a chronic condition or you maybe just want to feel better or you feel like you're missing something in your life or you want to get fitter or whatever it might be, we will take a chance because we want something to change and so much of wellness marketing exploits that hope and it exploits the fact that we are putting ourselves out there and trying something because we want to feel better and what that means then is that if it doesn't work, you feel really bad, you feel worse, possibly. You spent money, you spent time, you've got your hopes up and then it's, you know, it's taken away. You might not get medical advice when you need it because you're investing all your hope in this alternative treatment. So I wanted to talk about Acu Seeds. So, well, tell me what you know about Acu Seeds.
[00:02:56] Katie: There was a Dragon's Den scandal about them recently, where they invested, there's cultural appropriation issues, they don't work, all that sort of thing.
[00:03:09] Annabel: Yeah, so on, it was last year in 2023, I think, or maybe right at the beginning of this year, there was somebody who went on to Dragon's Den and she had a product which were Acu Seeds, which are, it ties into acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine and it's this idea that there points on your ears and putting pressure on them can help, supposedly, with various chronic conditions. So, it's a similar principle to chi in the body and energy lines and things like that.
[00:03:45] Katie: So, taping a tiny seed in your ear is supposed to put pressure on it.
[00:03:50] Annabel: Yeah, so they are kind of self adhesive little seeds that you stick in your ear and I think in this set that was being pitched on Dragon's Den, they came with a special map, a bit like a reflexology map, but for your ears.
[00:04:04] Katie: Oh, okay, right. So you put it on the lobe if you want bowel issues and inside the ear if you want anxiety.
[00:04:12] Annabel: Oh, yeah, I don't know the specific ins and outs of it, but it was essentially that. So this point for this thing and there was a huge backlash to this because the, a person that was pitching this said that the product had helped her recover from ME.
[00:04:32] Katie: Okay.
[00:04:33] Annabel: And lots of people, campaigners around ME, had said that it was promoting unfounded claims that the product could help the condition because there is no evidence to support the fact that it does. Now this, I think, raises some really interesting points because what, happened here clearly is we're conflating one person's experience, because we don't know what happened with that one individual person, with the claim that it can help people, other people with this condition and I think this brings up something interesting about wellness, which is we'll get to in a minute, but around the idea that what works for one person might not necessarily work for you and one person's personal experience is not the same thing as evidence. So you might have one person's experience, which then leads you to feel really hopeful that buying these Acu Seeds would give you the same experience, when if you've got a chronic condition and there's no evidence to prove that, it's really problematic.
[00:05:31] Katie: It's tricky, isn't it? Because I imagine if you've got ME, you're probably really keen to feel better. Someone says, oh, this helped me. It costs, I don't know, they were quite cheap, weren't they?
[00:05:42] Annabel: They were quite cheap.
[00:05:43] Katie: £20 maybe? Something like that?
[00:05:45] Annabel: Yeah.
[00:05:46] Katie: So not prohibitively expensive. So you probably thought, oh, we'll give it a try. Apparently it helps people with ME. That, I mean, that's problematic, isn't it? Because it's trading of people's insecurities.
[00:06:00] Annabel: 100%. Also this kind of emotional reaction that brings out then in people that you think, Oh wow, this is an amazing story, she's recovered from whatever it might be, or they, you know and then that it kind of overrides our rational brain when we hear these really emotive stories and we buy into the story and we want the same thing for us and it's just not going to be the same experience for everybody.
[00:06:25] Katie: I think that's a really good point because I think you can know rationally, oh this is one person's experience and that doesn't mean it's gonna help me, but you can be swept up in this, but it might, you know and I suppose if you're spending 20 quid like, what's the harm in one way, but it's also not exactly ethical.
[00:06:44] Annabel: Yeah, a hundred percent. Cognitive dissonance is my just favorite term when I think about wellness marketing that, you know, you can hold the idea in your head, two ideas in your two conflicting ideas in your head. So you might rationally know this isn't going to work, but you're willing to give it a go and it's totally understandable as well. I think that's the thing, like as consumers, it's not about, oh, you fell for this or it's not about that because the issue is on the marketing and how these things are presented to us. That's where the fault lies. So, second red flag, this grinds my gears, like nothing else, is wellness marketing often focuses on the pain point. I hate this so much.
[00:07:37] Katie: What's the pain point?
[00:07:38] Annabel: It's the problem. So you might, I don't know if you've heard this phrase, this is like a bit of a marketing cliche phrase. It's sell the sizzle, not the sausage. So when, so it's the idea that you sell the result of something, not the thing itself. So with a mattress, you sell the good night's sleep, not the mattress. So you're selling the result of the thing rather than the thing itself and this often we'll see with a retreat, for example, you're not selling the retreat, you're selling the idea that coming on this retreat will help you relax and unwind, or in coming to a yoga nidra class, it's not about coming and lying down on the floor and listening to meditation, it's about relaxing, yeah, exactly and unwinding. But what I think happens all the time in wellness is people get obsessed with this idea of the pain point or the problem and then catering to the problem and focusing almost obsessively on the problem. I don't really like talking about weight loss very much because I just think it's kind of an unhelpful conversation. But an example that I wanted to raise about this was something that happened to me a couple of times where I've been messaged on Instagram by health and weight loss coaches asking me to tell them what my health and wellness struggles are. I don't know these people but I... and this has happened a couple of times from different people and I cannot believe that people are doing this because there is no problem. So why are people suggesting that people have problems?
[00:09:18] Katie: An assumption that you have a problem.
[00:09:20] Annabel: It's horrendous. It's absolutely horrendous.
[00:09:22] Katie: Rude.
[00:09:23] Annabel: It's rude and I just cannot believe that somebody that is focused on wanting to help people get healthy would in anything, in any line of work, whether, you know, as a yoga teacher, can you tell me what your problems are with movement is just such a strange thing to do.
[00:09:45] Katie: Well also, if they don't know you, they don't know what your history is with food, eating, exercise, what might go into that, eating disorders or injury, illness, anything.
[00:09:57] Annabel: It's so problematic and I can only assume by the fact that I got two messages from different people that they're being coached by some kind of online business coach to do this kind of thing, which really makes me worried about what business coaches are teaching people.
[00:10:17] Katie: I mean coaching, we've discussed before, but yeah.
[00:10:20] Annabel: Kind of marketing or biz, it just, it's really a problem because what I think and I've been on courses as well before, where people have really gone hard on the pain point and talked about identifying the pain point, identify what is the issue that the target audience has and how can you create a product that you then sell back that fixes that problem, so then you can sell that sizzle, so can sell that it's overwhelm or, you know, this will help you feel less stressed or happier or whatever it is. So I would say watch out for language like struggle or change and investigate maybe again because it comes back to that feeling of hope that you might feel like somebody is really talking directly to you and directly to the issues you have, which again, people get taught to do this, you know, to try and get inside their target audience's head and really pinpoint the feelings that they're feeling and the issues that they're struggling with. So if, struggling with, there we go, I said it impulsively, or that they've got going on for them. But you know, if you feel like somebody is really, or something is maybe going too hard on the problem and pain points, just again, see if you can take a step back.
[00:11:44] Katie: So what, I mean, I suppose, what would you say that then would be a good marketing technique that wouldn't do that? I mean, if you're trying to solve a problem, say you're, you want to work with people who are burnout or chronically stressed, how would you market to them without doing that?
[00:12:06] Annabel: That's really tricky, but I think being very specific about what the thing is, and I think it is, I think it is fine to talk about this can help with this thing, but without that being like the sole...
[00:12:21] Katie: Yeah, and you wouldn't be cold DMing people, would you? So, I mean, that...
[00:12:26] Annabel: People come you, yeah, yeah and just delete those DMs or screenshot them and send them to me. Actually, I called that out on my Instagram and I never had as many messages from people, yeah, lots of people that work in wellness who were like, this is just horrendous and so I think it just shows there are some real bad
apples.
[00:12:50] Katie: I heard other people had the same thing.
[00:12:52] Annabel: People had and I think, I don't think it's just in that area, but there had been, I think like PTs and you know, something to watch out for. But yeah, and I think anyone DMing you.
[00:13:06] Katie: It's not a great sign, is it? Unless it's for other things, I suppose.
[00:13:13] Annabel: Anyone DMing you to try and...
[00:13:15] Katie: If someone's DMing you to tell you how great you are and that's fine.
[00:13:19] Annabel: Take it, but if they're trying to sell you a service or trying to get you to fill in a survey, I've had this quite often, fill in your survey about this thing that you've got on, because that will just feed into that.
[00:13:30] Katie: Quite often you can tell that it's a targeted thing, I get quite a lot of do you want to be our ambassador? And I'm like, you've sent this to 10, 000 people. But yeah, the individual ones, that is, it's sneaky for sure.
[00:13:43] Annabel: Yeah. Okay, the next red flag. Well, there's two here. But it's around language, so over medicalized or scientific language, so when people try and bamboozle you, basically, into believing things, with either over medicalised language, so really over complicating things. So I see it with medical language, but I also see it with kind of spiritual language as well. So we can get, so this is on the I don't know what the word is, but yeah, on the other end of the spectrum, so you know, for words like vortex and light code, what are people talking about? I don't know, or, you know, people, I see people talking about inflammation so much all the time and I still don't really understand what inflammation is, but just pseudo scientific language that is trying to convince you that they're more qualified than they are, or yeah, it's generally speaking, I think the simpler the language, the better, unless it's more.
[00:14:57] Katie: Okay.
[00:14:58] Annabel: On that and this was something that you and I were talking about, which is, I'm calling ethical washing language, which is another one to watch out for. So this is when wellness is marketed with language like accessible and inclusive and even ethical. So it's okay to sort of interrogate those a little bit, I think and just because somebody says that they're ethical or accessible and inclusive doesn't necessarily mean they 100 percent are.
[00:15:35] Katie: Oh, not even like a hundred percent. Maybe there's zero percent and they just know that it's it's a I guess as these terms become more kind of trendy, for example, with yoga saying that it's accessible or inclusive, it's very easy to say that, but I think, I know we say that, but I would welcome people to ask questions like what do you mean by that? How do you do that? what methods do you have in place to do that? And I think it's very easy to say, Oh, all levels, beginners welcome and then you go somewhere and it's really not like that. So that is probably the thing that I hate most about marketing is like when it's used to lie effectively to sell something which is a lie, it's just not true it's fine if you're trying to do that and maybe you fail in some areas or it's not great in some areas and you're responsive to feedback but if you're actually not, you've done nothing and you're just using those words then you're lying.
[00:16:48] Annabel: Yeah, I think inclusivity is really interesting because as we know there's lots of maybe well intentioned white ladies who maybe don't have a huge amount of experience with, you know, and I include myself in that actually to some extent, you know, who maybe don't have much experience with working with like diverse groups of people, unless they've got some kind of personal experience, they might not know how to make something inclusive, for example and a lot of this is coming through a personal lens and a wellness business might be a business of one where actually the lens is quite narrow, so what maybe somebody thinks is accessible and inclusive is to them because maybe they're catering to like a wide range of bodies, but actually they're not, it's not accessible to lots of other different people. It's not kind of intersectional accessibility.
[00:17:49] Katie: Yeah, I think that's really, it is really tricky to achieve that across the board in every single area of accessibility and inclusion. It's hard to do and I'm not sure that anyone does it perfectly. I guess if people are trying that's really good and if people are responsive to feedback then that's even better. So I would like to think that if someone came and sent us an email at the studio that I run of something we could do better, I would like to think I would really welcome that and I think if you're messaging someone and they are welcoming feedback, then that's a really good sign, because we all make mistakes and have blind spots, right? But if you're saying something, there's a difference between trying and coming up short or failing, and not trying at all and, or trying for appearance's sake.
[00:18:48] Annabel: Yeah. I think that is really interesting as well, I think because of the dynamic that we have. Taking yoga, for example, there is a dynamic at play between you and your yoga teacher and so actually, in order to create an environment where a student does feel able to call something out, or call something in, or you know, whatever, to say something. Actually, this isn't as accessible as you think, or, you know, maybe this language is a problem, or you know, I can't come because I, that sage makes me feel ill or something, you know, so actually being able to create an environment where you can say something is a fantastic sign and being responsive to that and open to that without making somebody think if you say something you can never go back to that class ever again. Number, what are we on? Five! People who aren't experts or qualified selling you stuff.
[00:19:52] Katie: They're everywhere.
[00:19:54] Annabel: So, so much of wellness is completely unregulated. Like yoga, for example. Some areas like food or things you ingest have some levels of regulation. So, there's different things that people will have to do. Be careful about when they're making claims. In a lot of it is in a grey area, or products, for example, or classes, or coaching, or whatever, it's very different across the industry. So what that means is there's a lot of space for kind of bad actors or people who maybe think they're experts on certain areas to position themselves as experts, which is what we talked about a lot in our previous episode on wellness bros.
[00:20:36] Katie: Well, people are also told to position themselves as experts, be like, you are an expert. Well, you're probably not. I mean, very few people are actually experts.
[00:20:45] Annabel: And I think, again, I'm talking about yoga here, but I think this is an interesting example that in yoga, so much of what your teacher tells you is based on an oral tradition of what that yoga teacher has heard or has been maybe passed down from their yoga teacher or they've read it on Instagram or seen it on YouTube. For example, trauma being stored in your hips. This is a kind of wellness classic. I don't know if that's really true. I think there is some evidence to support that, but the idea that if you stretch out your hip, you're going to get rid of your unresolved trauma, it's just somebody's been told that and it's been passed down.
[00:21:29] Katie: I mean, my opinion of that is that the idea that trauma is stored in your body has been, what's the opposite of watered down, concentrated down into the idea that trauma is literally stored in your body and I don't think that's true. It's not like you've got like a pocket of trauma in your hip. Yeah and if you like wiggle it about a bit, or get more stretchy, somehow that will pop out and float off into...
[00:21:57] Annabel: You'll be healed.
[00:21:58] Katie: I think we do store trauma in our bodies, but I don't think it's in little bubbles, yeah and again, that's an example of the language being like, simplified and commodified that you can tell someone something. Yoga can help with trauma, but under certain circumstances with certain people in certain ways.
[00:22:18] Annabel: Not just doing a really deep pigeon pose.
[00:22:20] Katie: Yeah, like pigeon is not gonna like remove...
[00:22:24] Annabel: Your therapy!
[00:22:24] Katie: Yeah. Oh God. It's just, oh, it drives me nuts. Yeah.
[00:22:28] Annabel: So, look for qualifications where there is a sort of standard level of qualification.
[00:22:36] Katie: I love a qualification, yeah.
[00:22:38] Annabel: They're great and don't trust everything that your wellness teacher or expert tells you.
[00:22:46] Katie: Yeah, also look for where that qualification is from. I would say, because there are certain places I'm thinking of, there's a wellness bro who has a school of coaching, which is one I might not go to. So, you know, people, there are a lot of people selling things like. trauma certifications, because it's hot in the yoga world right now, but who, where have they got that from? Is it from a recognised expert? Is it from a reputable school? Is it just...
[00:23:18] Annabel: Online.
[00:23:18] Katie: John down the road.
[00:23:19] Annabel: £9.99.
[00:23:20] Katie: Yeah, who's telling you that you can teach trauma aware yoga, if you do a pigeon pose.
[00:23:27] Annabel: Yeah.
[00:23:27] Katie: Because it'll pop the trauma out,
[00:23:31] Annabel: But actually what it will do is tear your ligaments.
[00:23:37] Katie: Yeah,
[00:23:39] Annabel: What happened to me!
[00:23:39] Katie: Give you something new to focus on, I guess, like...
[00:23:42] Annabel: Yeah.
[00:23:42] Katie: ...pain in your butt.
[00:23:43] Annabel: I know, so now you won't have trauma problems, you'll have physical pain. Okay, next red flag is hot takes for engagement. Engagement is enragement online and I see this so much in the health and fitness world. So this will be somebody saying, for example, high intensity training is terrible and then somebody else will do a stitch video saying high intensity training is rubbish, this guy is an idiot doesn't know what he's talking about and then it gets escalated to this point where you don't know what to believe, you just, it's so confusing. All you want to do is, you know, move your body or try and exercise and I think a lot of this is based on trust, who we feel kind of an affinity towards, where our, sort of online allegiances lie. But I think if people are just, you know, making these outlandish claims or just doing a hot take or really trying to take something down.
[00:24:54] Katie: I think it was the last couple of days, did you see that someone, I don't know who it was, on a podcast said walking's not exercise and it's gone everywhere, and of course it's getting them hits and and controversy and I mean, I think most people who work in the industry would know that's just not true. But there are people listening, thinking, oh, it's not exercise, I can't count that. Oh, it's just, but the reason someone's saying that, I think maybe this is me being cynical, is to get the engagement bit and get people following them, liking them and it's just very disingenuous and unethical.
[00:25:38] Annabel: Yeah. I remember when we talked to Arj, in series two about tech and Arj was, is a running coach and he was making some really good points around that about actually so much of what we do with our bodies and our health and our wellness, it's all so nuanced and it's all like hundreds of different areas of how we feel and what is, what constitutes wellness. But what we want or what we're so used to receiving is a hot take or is a five quick tricks for this that you lose all that nuance and that doesn't really serve us well. It's not as easy as one viral video, it's hundreds of different, you know, scales.
[00:26:29] Katie: It's just repackaged, isn't it, into something. It's making me think about, how like, when we were young, the hot diets were like the cabbage soup diet, do you remember that? And Slimfast and now it's kind of repackaged, not as diets, but as blood glucose monitoring, or clean eating, or paleo, or something like that's health and it's still...
[00:27:02] Annabel: Yeah.
[00:27:03] Katie: ...dieting, and it's still not necessarily that useful for lots of people.
[00:27:09] Annabel: The next red flag. Scarcity marketing tactics. Hate this. So, this might be somebody selling a workshop or a retreat or something like that and they're saying, two places left. Get in before we sell out or was expecting to sell out and very often there are not two places left, especially if it's for something online where there's limitless capacity.
[00:27:39] Katie: Exactly.
[00:27:40] Annabel: But this is a kind of real classic, not great marketing technique where people want you to think that things are flying off the shelves. If you don't move now, you're going to miss out, and it also happens with pricing. So people will say this is the last time you're going to get this at this low price. So you need to act now or next time I run this course or this workshop, the pricing is going to be double the price.
[00:28:08] Katie: Yeah and I think there's a lot of this isn't scarcity marketing, I'm just offering you an opportunity and I'm just telling you that the price is going to change, but it is actually scarcity.
[00:28:19] Annabel: Why do you need to tell us that the price is going to change? There was a brilliant podcast and BBC series on Lighthouse.
[00:28:30] Katie: Oh yeah, I listened to that!
[00:28:31] Annabel: cult, and they were talking a lot about the pricing in that and how that kind of mindset was used to encourage people to invest a huge amount of money. Payment plans also are, can be problematic. Sometimes they're great. Sometimes I think payment plans for, are brilliant, but the problem arises if the payment that you're being asked to make over a number of months totals up to a cost that's much more than the payment for one thing. So, if something costs 200 pounds, but then over, if you want a payment plan, you're going to end up paying 300. That's really problematic. So...
[00:29:15] Katie: I will say payment plans do involve more admin. So I wouldn't object to someone charging a bit extra, but yeah, if it's significantly more.
[00:29:27] Annabel: Like that, yeah, if it's covering the cost totally, you know and you would expect that a little bit, but when it's really...
[00:29:33] Katie: It's often used in pyramid schemes and things like that as well, isn't it? Because it's well, you can pay this and then actually you end up paying out far more than you would have done otherwise because you're paying in installments or you're paying in increasing installments or something like that.
[00:29:50] Annabel: And you can justify that cost, maybe more because you spread over the months that, you know, you're, you know, it's easier than for you to rationalise. There's something called the sunk cost fallacy, which is when...
[00:30:06] Katie: I've heard that applied to relationships, yeah.
[00:30:08] Annabel: Oh, okay. So it's basically when you've invested a lot in something already that you think, oh well, I'll just keep chucking more money or love at...
[00:30:19] Katie: Yeah, yeah.
[00:30:20] Annabel: ...the situation because you've already put so much into it. So once you're involved in something like maybe you've already bought your, the juicer and this is maybe a bit of a retro reference but you bought your juicer so then you might as well keep juicing.
[00:30:36] Katie: The nineties, you're juicing, yeah.
[00:30:38] Annabel: You know, you bought the thing and my final wild wellness marketing red flag is selling an individual experience as something that will definitely happen to you. So, this is kind of coming back to that hope idea that we were talking about at the top of the episode. But I think can be quite helpful when we're looking at wellness to think about what is evidence? What is proof? And how much proof do we need to see in something? And what I found really interesting when I've been writing about some wellness practices is that a lot of alternative and complementary medicines don't have a huge amount of really strong peer reviewed research done on them and that's for a number of reasons, maybe because they're new and emerging. A lot of research that is done is often done by the people that, whose interest it's in to research...
[00:31:39] Katie: To sell.
[00:31:40] Annabel: Yeah, that thing but a lot of doctors that I have spoken to have said, you know, we would love more research on these holistic practices, but it's just that the research doesn't exist or if it does, it's probably slightly biased.
[00:31:56] Katie: Right?
[00:31:59] Annabel: Evidence is amazing when we've got good studies, but then kind of beneath that we've got personal experience and It's not to say that's invalid, because it is valid and of course it is valid, but I think it is really important to separate out the idea that what works for one person won't necessarily work for you and wellness generally is selling an individual experience. We've talked about this so much before, but it's all about the self, you, your personal experience and it doesn't take into account any background, so illness, mobility, who you are, where you know, what you're coming to the table with. So often that is quite exclusionary because it's only really serving one type of person that's maybe in an extremely privileged position already. So when we're getting these mass statements or this idea that if something doesn't work it's your fault rather than the product's fault, that's something to be wary of.
[00:33:00] Katie: There is so much of that around, isn't there?
[00:33:03] Annabel: Any other red flags that you've seen, Katie?
[00:33:06] Katie: I think the scarcity marketing thing is just, for me, just don't, there's no reason to do it, just don't do it. Something is selling out and you're saying there's two places left, there should be two places left and if something isn't selling and you're freaking out a bit, then either there's a problem with your marketing, or it's not the right thing. So, those are the things that you have to work on. I don't, I also don't really think it works that well, unless you're really selling to a group of people and then it's hard work, isn't it? Because you're having to call them individually. I don't think it really works on Instagram and things like that. It's a waste of time and energy aside from being...
[00:33:56] Annabel: Gross.
[00:33:56] Katie: Gross. So just don't do it.
[00:33:59] Annabel: Oh yeah. But I do think that, again, coming back to this point, I've certainly bought wellness products or services or experiences where, because of these things in the past, a hundred percent and I probably will again, but I think it's not... I think the majority of people aren't out to get us, but I think that as consumers, it's not our fault either if we've, you know, end up buying something, you know, that we think is going to really help some random wellness product and it ends up in the cupboard. We shouldn't feel bad about that. But wellness is quite... it's an industry, it's a massive industry, we know this and it's going to keep morphing and changing, and I think as the landscape in which it sells changes more, it's just good to be savvy and just be aware of what some of the things that might be trying to get you to override that rational frame that is you don't need this!
[00:35:02] Katie: I think it's similar to the kind of, episode that we did on Podcasting Bros in a way of what are they trying to sell you and why? and what is the evidence that they're giving you that it works? And where does that come from? If it's personal experience, fine, I would take a supplement based on my friend's recommendation, fine, but that's not gonna damage me. It might cost me twenty quid or something, but it's not the end of the world if it doesn't work for me. But if it is, I did this thing and it changed my life completely, then I would be very sceptical about that. Yeah and I think, you know, qualifications and personal recommendation if you're looking to do something like coaching or anything like that where they're selling you a service, be like, well, who did that person learn from? Do I think they're okay? And what experience does this person have doing this?
[00:36:00] Annabel: And what specifically are you going to get from that?
[00:36:03] Katie: Yeah, yeah. What is the payment plan? Where is the end point of the payment plan? How much is the service going to cost me in total? And again, I think it should be that if someone is straightforward and ethical, all this information should be given to you freely, and it should be obvious and clear and transparent and if it's not, then I would slowly back away and go somewhere else.
[00:36:26] Annabel: Yeah. Let us know your red flags, if you've got any, or your green flags. Maybe we should do a green
[00:36:33] Katie: Green flags episode. Oh yeah, we should do a green flags episode.
[00:36:35] Annabel: Come and find us on Instagram @wellnessquestioned. We'd love to hear your questions or question us and we will see you next week!