Every wellness founder knows what brand building is supposed to buy them. The question is how it works, and that is where most marketing writing goes vague. The honest answer has a research base behind it, and it is not the version most supplement and activewear teams grew up with. This guide sets out the modern view of how brands grow, applies it to health and wellness, and points to where the category is different, because it is.
The source for the modern view is the work of Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, most fully in How Brands Grow. The short version of that research is that brands grow mostly by winning more light buyers, not by turning existing buyers into fanatics, and they grow when they are easier to notice and easier to buy. Everything in this guide follows from that.
The short answer
Brand building in health and wellness is the long-term work of making a brand easy to choose: mental availability so the category thinks of it first, distinctive assets so it is recognised, and the professional layer that recommends it. Performance marketing cannot do this work. Brand tracking is how you prove it is happening.
40,000+
fitness and health professionals in the hale ecosystem
~7 in 10
coaches recommend at least one supplement category to clients
152
countries reached across coaches and their clients
Where the figures come from
This guide uses the already-published topline from hale's ecosystem research: a voluntary practice-profile survey (2,184 valid responses, fielded March to September 2026) combined with platform activity across a 90-day window in 2026, drawn from more than 40,000 fitness and health professionals and their clients. Everything is aggregated and anonymised. The frameworks cited (mental availability, category entry points, distinctive assets, the 60/40 split) are named theories from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and from Binet and Field, attributed as such and not claimed as hale's own.
What brand building means
Brand building is the work of making a brand more likely to be thought of and chosen. In the Ehrenberg-Bass view it has two measurable halves. Mental availability is the probability that the brand comes to mind in a buying situation. Distinctive assets are the cues, colours, shapes, sounds and phrases that let a buyer recognise the brand in a second, even in a crowd. Neither is the same as advertising reach, and neither is the same as a product claim.
A wellness brand with high mental availability is the one that surfaces when someone decides it is time to start taking a magnesium supplement, or to upgrade their activewear, or to try a new protein. A brand with strong distinctive assets is the one a shopper can pick off a shelf without reading the label. The two work together, and the research is consistent that they are the main levers of growth for most brands in most categories.
How brands actually grow
The counterintuitive finding in How Brands Grow is who a brand grows from. Almost every category is bought mostly by light buyers, people who buy rarely and spread their loyalty across several brands. Growth comes from winning more of those light buyers, not from squeezing existing heavy buyers for a little more each. That reframes brand building as an availability problem, a reach and salience problem, more than a persuasion problem. You are not convincing a small group to switch. You are making sure the large group of occasional buyers thinks of you first when the occasion arrives.
For a DTC wellness brand that pattern bites twice. The category is young, so the light-buyer pool is huge and growing. And much of the switching is not driven by ads at all, it is driven by occasion: a new goal, an injury, a season, a recommendation. Brands that are mentally available at the moment of the occasion win the purchase. Brands that only exist inside their own ads are invisible there. That is the whole case for brand building in this category, and it is also why a general awareness score, read on its own, tells you very little about whether the brand is winning.
Category entry points, and the one wellness keeps missing
Mental availability is built around category entry points: the occasions, needs and situations that cause someone to think of the category in the first place. For supplements they are things like "before a big training block", "when sleep slips", "when the doctor mentions a deficiency". A brand is mentally available to the degree that it is linked in memory to the entry points that actually matter to its buyers.
Wellness has one entry point that is underweighted in almost every plan, and it is the one hale exists to measure: the moment a professional recommends the category. When a coach tells a client to try a protein or a recovery product, the client enters the category through that recommendation, and the brand chosen in that moment is chosen before the consumer forms a view of their own. Across the hale ecosystem, roughly seven in ten coaches recommend at least one supplement category to clients. That makes professional recommendation a mainstream entry point, not a niche one, and a general-population tracker structurally cannot see it. The data on this sits in the recommendation layer research.
Distinctive assets: why wellness labels blur together
Distinctive assets are what let a brand be recognised without a logo read. In wellness the shelf is crowded with brands using the same white bottles, the same pastel palettes, the same serif typeface and the same "clean" language, so recognition is genuinely hard. The brand that owns a colour, a symbol or a phrase the category can repeat has an asset no competitor can easily copy. This is the topic of the fuller piece on distinctive brand assets; the short version is that consistency over time matters more than novelty in a campaign.
Brand building versus activation
Brand building is not the same as performance marketing, and the distinction is not a preference, it is a division of labour. The IPA analysis by Binet and Field, set out in The Long and the Short of It, found that the brands that grew most spent roughly 60% of their budget on brand building and 40% on activation. That split is a category-average finding, not a law, and it is the subject of its own piece on the 60/40 rule. The fuller case for how the two halves of the budget should sit together is covered in the brand versus performance guide. The practical point here is that activation captures demand and brand building creates it, and a business that funds only activation is harvesting a brand it never plants.
In wellness the temptation to run pure performance is strong, because the category is DTC-heavy and the dashboards are right there. The cost is that a challenger with a stronger brand can come in and take the demand you paid to create. Share of voice, the topic of its own guide in this series, is the lead indicator worth watching: the brand with sustained share of voice in the category tends to be the one that grows.
What to build first, and how to know it is working
For a wellness brand the build order is usually the same. Fix positioning first: a clear, distinct answer to who the brand is for and why it exists, without which every later asset is wasted. Then build the distinctive assets and hold them consistently. Then fund the media and the professional-layer work that build mental availability, and make sure the professional layer is part of that, because in this category it is where availability is won. Positioning for a DTC wellness brand is covered in its own piece later in this series.
None of this is faith, and none of it is unmeasurable. Brand building moves the same awareness, consideration and preference measures that brand tracking reads, so the two disciplines are two halves of one system: you build, and you measure what you build. For the plain-English version of what those measures are and how to read them, see what is brand tracking, and for how continuous measurement works in practice, the brand insights page walks through the method.
Build the brand, and see it move
Brand building is the long game, and it is measurable in the same months you are building it. hale tracks awareness, consideration and preference continuously, against your competitive set, including the professionals who shape the category.
Frequently asked questions
What is brand building?
Brand building is the long-term work of making a brand easier to think of and easier to recognise, so it is chosen more often across a category's light buyers. In the Ehrenberg-Bass view it is primarily a matter of mental availability and distinctive assets, more than persuasion or loyalty programmes.
What is mental availability?
Mental availability is the probability that a brand comes to mind in a buying situation. It is built by linking the brand to the category entry points, the occasions and needs that trigger a purchase, so that when the occasion arrives, the brand surfaces. It is the concept at the centre of Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow.
What are category entry points?
Category entry points are the occasions, needs and situations that cause a buyer to think of a category in the first place, such as "before a big training block" for supplements. Brands grow by being mentally linked to the entry points that matter to their buyers, which is how availability turns into sales.
Why is brand building different for health and wellness brands?
Because the professional layer is a mainstream entry point in this category. Coaches and practitioners shape a large share of purchases, and hale research finds roughly seven in ten coaches recommend at least one supplement category to clients. Building availability among those professionals is part of brand building in wellness in a way a general category does not have.
Published August 2026 as the strategy hub of hale's guide to brand building for health and wellness brands. hale is a health-tech holding company; its coaching platforms, QuickCoach and FitFocus, form the network behind its research. The frameworks cited here are the work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow) and Binet and Field (IPA), and are attributed rather than claimed. To see brand building measured against your competitive set, start a conversation or reach us at research@halehealth.io.
