On the Beauty & Wellness Forum, Wendy Liebmann, chief executive officer and chief shopper at WSL Strategic Retail, led a discussion on the long run of ladies’s health. Panelists included Kelly Fanning, general manager, United States pain, cardio and dermatology at Bayer Consumer Health; Michelle Jacobs, chief operating officer and cofounder of menopause solutions brand Womaness, and Dr. Fahimeh Sasan, chief innovation officer and founding physician at fertility clinic and platform Kindbody. 

Throughout the conversation, panelists emphasized destigmatizing the conversation around women’s health by providing accessible education, using daring messaging and creating communities. For these brands, this looks like products featuring direct-use cases, period campaigns that feature blood, influencer campaigns, online discussion boards, democratizing access to fertility care and more.

“If we’re going to take a proactive preventative approach, it has to begin with young people and at every stage of life, and education becomes a fundamental a part of that,” said Sasan. “We will’t educate people if it’s a taboo topic.” 

The extent of silence placed on women’s health has led to massive amounts of misinformation, the panel agreed. 

For instance, based on Fanning, an enormous a part of Bayer’s mission has been teaching menstruators that periods shouldn’t be extremely painful and that they can take medications like Midol to ease symptoms, even before they grow to be severe. The brand has seen this sentiment ring true especially with younger generations.

“What we’re finding on this latest health and wellness space, what menstruators are really gravitating towards is, it doesn’t have to be that bad. Why should we ever be in discomfort? That was really good insight behind a few of our latest work called ‘Reach for Comfort,’ driving menstruators to not need to be at that tipping point to achieve for comfort,” Fanning said. 

And it’s this sort of honest and approachable message that’s resonating with consumers, especially in the ladies’s health space. It’s the identical for Jacobs of Womaness, who also emphasized the importance of teaching consumers. She said that buyers are lacking in education relating to menopause, and infrequently so are doctors. Sasan agreed, noting that on average, OB-GYNs receive just half-hour of menopause training in the course of the course of their studies. 

“Every nine out of 10 women we spoke to had no idea what the definition of menopause was,” said Jacobs, of after they were constructing out Womaness. “They didn’t know what perimenopause was. They didn’t have a physician that they might speak to about what was occurring with their body.” 

In an effort to shift this, accessible education drives the brand — for Womaness, this comes through on the web site with a “Community” tab where women can chat with one another, and a “Learn” tab with educational material, a quiz to seek out the appropriate products and a newsletter. 

“We’re not only skincare supplements and sexual wellness products,” Jacobs said. “We’re really becoming a spot to begin your journey. We’re finding that as we educate women, it helps with the taboo.” 

Making it easy for consumers to seek out information has also proven successful with Kindbody, as its expansion strategy is to democratize access to fertility care. 

“We’re literally on the road corners,” said Sasan. “We intentionally built our clinics on a retail level where people work and play since it was imperative that we brought the conversation out into the open because one out of six adults experiences fertility issues in the US.”

As with constructing out locations on popular street corners, employing daring brand messaging can also be essential to face out.

“They [consumers] want it easy and so they want it really daring and clear as to what a product does,” said Fanning. “We do this very daring and openly with our first-time menstruators. They wish to hear, see every little thing about it. For the primary time in our marketing campaign we showed blood.”

This also looks like daring and clear products that directly state the use cases, reminiscent of Womaness’ Me.No.Pause complement, $47, which outlines hot flashes, night sweats, memory, focus and calm and sex drive as its targets. In keeping with Jacobs, this kind of messaging has been successful at acquiring latest customers and driving sales.

“There’s this hunger for ‘Tell me what I would like and [tell] me tips on how to buy it and tell me tips on how to use these products and tell me why I’m having these symptoms’,” she said. “They desired to realize it was going to assist them with their hot flashes. It was going to assist them with their vaginal dryness. It was going to assist them with their wrinkles on their face. They didn’t wish to be described as being older…but after they actually talk concerning the product, they desired to know the product was really addressing their symptoms.”

For Bayer, tapping influencers to teach consumers and create a way of community has been a powerful strategy, based on Fanning.

“TikTok is where a number of health and wellness is going on and we’re using content creators,” she said, noting it is a option to use the voice of the patron. “They’re creating on their very own terms and so they’re creating their very own little communities.”

With this, Sasan also noted, it is vital to tap doctors when working on these latest products to make sure they understand how they work and are in a position to share them with patients.