Brand teams are often wary of marketing to and through health & wellness professionals out of concern that any communication outside the standard brand matrix will detract from their core brand building—or worse yet, undermine their brand. In fact, the opposite is true. Health professionals add credibility and trust to core brand building activities.

When we wrote about the (d)evolution of influencer marketing this summer, we focused on the fact that influencer marketing through bloggers and social media personalities has becoming increasingly risky for brands—particularly when consumers are valuing trust and credibility more than ever.

Since that post, there has been no decline in the number of articles and stories that cast influencer marketing in a poor light. Fake followers, gimmicky stunts, influencers who aren’t who they say they are, online influencer marketplaces. It goes on and on.

 Here at Pulse, we recently experienced our own influencer “fail” that proves just how, well, ridiculous, the world of digital and social influencers has become.

We constantly make the argument for providing health-conscious consumers with more information, not less.

But what about education in-store and at shelf? In the article, Are grocers falling short in selling better-for-you foods? from Retail Wire, Denise Leathers looks at what retailers can do to help consumers find—and learn about—better-for-you products.

Back in February, we wrote about the Med School Nutrition Gap—the gap between the impact medical students say that nutrition education has on how they treat patients and the minimal amount of nutrition training that these students typically receive.

Now there's more evidence of this gap and suggestions on how to close it.

One of out favorite adages is that health-conscious consumers want more information not less. They want to know what is in the food they eat and what is not in the food they eat. They want to know where it comes from, how it is made, and if it has functional benefits, how those work.

That's why we advise clients to build their healthy brand messaging around education—both about their product and the particular need-states it addresses.

Two recent news items put an even finer point on what is required of those marketing healthy brands in today's competitive health and wellness marketplace.