The Healthspan Trend: Can Your Partnerships Help Fans Live Better, Longer?

In a recent report on the top five global consumer trends for 2025, market research company Euromonitor International highlighted the desire among adults to live healthier for longer, extending not just the length of their lives but the quality of those years.

The goal is to lessen or eliminate the current nine-year average gap between lifespan—longevity—and healthspan, the amount of time a person spends in good health, free from chronic disease and disability.

To achieve that objective, consumers are making lifestyle and behavioral changes, along with seeking product solutions from numerous sources, including tech companies and food and beverage makers.

Rights holders and their brand partners should seize on the many opportunities they have to capitalize on this movement, delivering relevancy and value to their target audiences and reaping the benefits through increased interest, loyalty and purchase behavior. In particular:

Brands: Create activation opportunities around sponsored teams, leagues and events that involve consumer participation in related fitness and wellness activities. Examples include sports clinics to hone skills and co-branded training videos that take advantage of the property’s institutional knowledge and athlete relationships.

The caveat here is that a one-size-fits-all approach will not work. Specific segments—women, men, young adults, seniors—have specific needs and health concerns. Marketers will need granular data and consumer insights to determine which segments would best align with sports-focused activations and what those specific programs should entail to encourage maximum involvement.

Consider how you might partner with smart devices or apps that track exercise, mobility and health metrics and integrate them into activations. Watches, wearables and apps continue to grow in usage, especially among Millennials and Gen Z, with global sales of connected wearables expected to achieve double-digit growth from 2024 to 2026, according to Euromonitor.

Properties: In addition to targeting those same tech solutions as potential partners, add other categories that are benefiting from the healthspan trend to your prospect lists.

For example, beyond traditional healthcare and nutrition providers, the personalized vitamins category is poised to emerge as both interest in customization and competition in the sector increase.

In the U.S. alone, the personalized nutrition and supplements market size was estimated at $4.55 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 16.28 percent from 2024 to 2030, according to Grand View Research.

Upstart providers offering direct-to-consumer supplement subscriptions include HUM Nutrition, Rootine, Thorne, Viome and Vous Vitamin among many others.

Not only are they competing with themselves for market share, but they are also going up against dominant players offering personalized vitamin packs, including Bayer, GNC and Otsuka Pharmaceutical through their respective Care/of, GNC4U and nurish by Nature Made brands.

In short, responding to the healthspan trend could lead to healthier bottom lines for many sports marketers.