Don't Give Up: Four Apps To Help You Keep Your New Year's Resolution

Like many Americans, I find it hard to stick to New Year’s resolutions.  This year, I resolved to do things to improve my overall wellness.  This means exercising regularly, getting plenty of sleep, and maintaining financial wellness.  After struggling to keep my resolution for a month and a half, I decided to pull out the big gun… my iPhone.  Here are four mobile apps that help me keep my 2012 resolution: 

BitGym

BitGym is a mobile app that turns monotonous cardio machine exercise into a fun videogame.  The app uses the iPhone and iPad’s forward-facing camera and accelerometer to power and control a bike down an European bike trail or a gondola through a Venetian canal.

Go! To Sleep  

Sleep is critical to your physical and emotional health.  The Go To Sleep! mobile app helps users monitor sleeping patterns and learn how to optimize their sleep by improving their personal “Sleep Score.”

Morsel

Morsel is a mobile app that makes wellness resolutions a bit less daunting by offering easy-to-achieve micro wellness challenges that add up to a healthier lifestyle.

Mint

Mint is a mobile and web app that aggregates financial accounts online and helps users manage their personal finances.  This makes it easy to set and monitor budgets and achieve savings goals. 

Behavior change through technology is an increasingly hot topic in the health and wellness tech circles.  With raising health costs, corporations are resorting to innovative wellness programs like Keas, to keep employees healthy and costs low.  For these corporations, this isn’t just about keeping a resolution- it is about finding a business solution.  I suspect brands will start taking advantage of these new technologies.  First we will see hyper-relevant ads such as a sleeping aid advertisements that pop up whenever the Sleep Now! user routinely doesn’t get a quality night’s sleep.  Eventually, we will see more brands and agencies partnering together to build their own technology that is relevant, valuable and changes buying behavior.  In other words, who knows what technology we will be using in 2013 to help us stick to our resolutions!

Have you used any apps to help you keep your 2012 resolution?  Have you used any of the above apps in the past?  What was your experience?

Stay well,

Ryan Drumwright

Jr. Planner

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True Confessions of A Trader Joe’s Shopper

I never really saw myself as a loyal grocery store shopper. Aren't all grocery stores the same? Sure, I had my usual store, but that was just because it was close to home and had good product variety. If there was a similar store close by, I wouldn't have any problems switching. It's just groceries after all...

Or is it?

Since I've lived in New York, I've turned into a very loyal Trader Joe's shopper. I go there so often, I can list all of their products and prices. Last weekend, I decided to venture out and try WholeFoods. I spent five minutes cruising the aisles and then turned around and walked to Trader Joe's. I couldn't take it. I needed to feel at home. I needed my TJ fix.

There's something bigger than 59-cent apples keeping me hungry for my next TJ visit. It's the overall Trader Joe's experience.

When you walk though Trader Joe's door, you know what you are going to get. You know where to find your favorite products. The atmosphere is cool, friendly, relaxed and authentic, and employees actually seem happy to help you even though the place is packed like sardines (Trader Joe's sells some great sardines by the way).

So, how can we turn my love for TJ’s into something helpful and beneficial to marketers interested in wellness? It is all about creating experiences.

You don’t have to be a retail grocery chain to create a meaningful experience for consumers. With the popularity of popup stores and consumer experience design, there are infinite opportunities for wellness brands to get into the experiential marketing mix. For instance, Sanofi-Aventis and the Prevent Cancer Foundation placed a 20-foot long inflatable colon in Times Square as part of a cross-country colorectal-cancer awareness tour. The foundation claims they have seen a trend of increases in screenings, and a reduction of mortality rates since the tour’s launch.

There is one key thing that I’ve learned from all of these examples: an effective branded experience needs to be:

• Relevant
• Multi-sensory
• Emotional
• Differentiating

It doesn’t seem to matter if you are selling turkeys for the holidays or encouraging people to take care of their health, the experiences that make the greatest impact includes each of these four elements. So this holiday season as popup stores are popping up everywhere, keep your eyes out for these elements, and see if they include everything on the list.

Until then, let’s just go to Trader Joe’s.

Stay well, be well.

Ryan Drumwright
Junior Planner

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Learning How To Learn

We have a new junior planner here at SSW, and one of the perks of having young minds around is that their enthusiasm propels them to discover things we more mature folks might not.

Last week, one of the things he discovered was this article in the New York Times on what recent research has taught us about how people learn – one of our favorite topics here at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness.

Wellness is quite often difficult. For most of us – and our audiences – it includes making some fairly ambitious long-term changes to their behavior. A lot goes into behavior change, but one key ingredient is learning and mastering new information.

Thus I was fascinated by some of the “learning myths” the Times article debunked. Here is my quick-and-dirty synopsis of their three rules for better learning:

1. Say good bye to your favorite study spot. Researchers have discovered that people retain new information better if they vary up the places where they consume this info. They theorize that we store new information by its relation to other data in our brains. When you are learning, your brain is also consuming the sensory data from the environment around you. So, if you change up where you are learning, your brain has more info associated with what you learn, and thus you retain it better.

2. One thing at a time – not so much. Related information gets remembered better than like information. Researchers have demonstrated that students who studied mixed sets of four types of equations retained the whole lesson much better than other students who studied one type of equation at a time.

3. Testing is good! In another experiment, researchers showed that being immediately tested on material you just learned helps you retain that information long term. The effort your brain exerts for the test helps cement the new information into your neurons.

Learning is equal parts important and difficult. It’s comforting that – through the magic of science and research – we can still get better at it.

Hope this finds you well.

Jacob Braude
VP, Planner

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