McNeil Provides Solutions at Shelf
For Shoppers of the OTC Drug Category
By John Karolefski
Benadryl and Dayquil may provide quick relief for ailing shoppers, but they still have a headache from the assortment of over-the-counter (OTC) drugs at retail. Shoppers are confused by the dizzying array of health care products and are looking for solutions.
The good news is that retailers are in position to ease their pain, but there are complications. Shopper behavior varies from shopping trip to shipping trip, depending on the purpose of the store visit.
“The symptoms people are suffering from can influence their overall behavior. If they are going in for an immediate or urgent need, they will behave differently than if they are on a replenishment trip,” explains Michael Pishvanov, Associate Director of Shopper Marketing Sales Strategy at McNeil Consumer Healthcare.
So what is the right approach at retail?
To find out, the maker of such brands as Tylenol, Motrin and Imodium A-D studied shopper behavior and attitudes about the nonprescription drug category. Research last year by parent company Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical and health care giant, is now paying off for those retailers deploying some of the recommendations from the study.
The objective of the research was to learn more about the “shopability” of the OTC drug category, and uncover suggestions for better messaging and other communication strategies
at the shelf.
“It’s all about trip type and motivation. What we wanted to do was provide some solutions for retailers to help them differentiate themselves in the overall landscape and to increase conversion,” says Pishvanov, speaking in a presentation at the recent Shopper Insights in Action conference. The popular annual event was hosted in Chicago by the Institute for International Research (IIR).
The research focused largely on three product categories: pain relief, upper respiratory and digestive health. The methodology included ethnography, shop-a-longs, an online survey, and other research by Kantar Retail. For the shop-a-longs, researchers worked with six major retailers in three channels (food, drug and mass). The qualitative ethnography and shop-a-longs were used to generate hypotheses for quantitative work
The key results of the research were that health care and OTC products at retail is a complex category that leaves shoppers overwhelmed and often confused. They have to deal with a wide variety of products and often hard-to-read information on small packages. People need to absorb product information more easily in the aisle, especially when they are taking other medications and need to avoid side effects from mixing drugs. People also need to shop the section more quickly when decisions are urgently needed.
The study found that shoppers want better category organization and improved navigational messaging. Over 80% of them recommend organizing and messaging the shelf according
to symptom.
“As they go down the aisle, shoppers want to see a proper flow of products that make sense,” Pishvanov says. “There are certain things than can be done that can help. Using colors, for instance, can help differentiate segments. You want to be careful and not create a whole rainbow at the shelf, but still make some distinctions.”
Shoppers want more information at the shelf, according to the research. More than eight of
ten shoppers (81%) want more OTC drug information on the product package itself, more than half (54%) desire more signage, and four of ten (41%) would welcome personal advice from
a pharmacist.
The important role of major brands was singled out by shoppers. They would welcome “beacon brands” to help draw them to the products they are looking for in the cluttered nonprescription drug section. Shoppers say using well-recognized national brands such as Tylenol and Benadryl serve as “beacons” to help navigation in the section.
“We recommend using beacon brands at top of the shelf to draw people in,” says Pishvanov. “So, from 30 feet away, somebody can look and – even if they can’t speak English – realize what that category is.”
The study confirmed that all shopping trips are not the same. The two major trips types are replenishment (people who know about a product and are merely replenishing it) and immediate or urgent need (to treat or cure an ailment).
That is why “we recommend developing strategies based on trip type and not just by focusing on a category,” explains Pishvanov.
He also recommended that retailers leverage their unique strengths such as one-stop shopping and large assortments (but with better organization and navigation cues). Other opportunities
to focus on include staging promotions and relying on available advice from a pharmacist
where possible.
Deploying suggestions from the research, combined with customized retail concepts, can make food, drug and mass stores a desirable destination for health care and OTC products, according to Pishvanov. Some retailers are already scoring “quick wins” with their implementations.
There will be additional research by J&J, he said, with the goal of developing the “shelf of the future” for this profitable category.
Shopper Strategies Change Game for CPGs, Retailers
By Win Weber and Brian Ross
As retailers intensify their quest for rich, data-driven insights into their best shoppers, manufacturers have a unique opportunity to bring their own analytical strengths to the cause. Viewing today’s marketplace challenges through a common lens – the perspective of the individual shopper – CPGs can collaborate with their retail partners to transform deeper intelligence into higher sales, greater market share and more profitable long-term relationships.
A few progressive retailers are leading the way in this shopper-centric revolution. But there’s still plenty of time to catch up. Already, forward-looking manufacturers are working closely with their key retail partners, shaping more powerful strategies to target highest-value shoppers. In doing so, they’re stretching the traditional boundaries of category management.
Manufacturer’s Pivotal Role
Retailers have been analyzing shopper data since the first point-of-sale terminal was installed more than three decades ago. But in recent years things have changed. Loyalty programs have grown increasingly sophisticated, making it easier than ever to link specific transactions to the individuals behind them. Advances in analytics have kept pace, bringing a new level of refinement to understanding how, when, where and, most important, why people shop the way they do.
Armed with these unprecedented insights, retailers are finding more effective ways to influence behavior, focusing in particular on those shoppers who are likely to yield the most value over the long term. A recent study commissioned by Precima and conducted by IDC Global Retail Insights reveals that 75% of retailers rank becoming more shopper-centric as one of the top three keys to success. Where do manufacturers fit into this revolution in shopper-focused retailing?
The leading CPG companies have been building up their analytical expertise for years, investing heavily in richer sources of consumer data and the talent required to decode it.
Now, as leading retailers leverage their shopper data in the quest for still-deeper insights,
manufacturers have a unique opportunity to apply their own proven strengths in furthering that goal. The drive among progressive, shopper-focused retailers to rethink marketing and merchandising strategies is matched by the energy that leading CPGs bring to increasing understanding of their categories and brands. Where the two can come together is in viewing the challenges ahead through a common lens – the perspective of the individual shopper – as they collaborate to transform data-driven intelligence into higher incremental sales, greater market share and more profitable shopper relationships.
Starting from Shopper’s POV
Traditionally, CPGs have focused on determining what kinds of consumers shop an overall category, or buy a particular product, or choose a unique size or format or flavor. At the risk of oversimplifying, manufacturers’ strong suit has been analyzing consumer preferences and brand attributes – determining, for instance, whether people would be more inclined to buy
pre-prepared microwavable entrées if they included different ethnic cuisines, or if they were packaged in individual serving sizes. But more and more retailers are saying, “Let’s start by homing in on our most loyal and valuable shoppers. What motivates them to buy one brand over another – or to choose a specific item – or to shop the category at all?”
Using transaction-based data, a shopper-focused retailer starts by identifying key groups among its best shoppers. One of these high-value segments may be time-starved large families who are looking for quick and easy weekday meal solutions. And one of the product categories addressing that need may be microwavable entrées.
From there, close analysis of basket contents will yield insights into what might motivate current entrée purchasers to buy more, or how to attract other shoppers within this segment. This in turn may lead to product-specific decisions around cuisine and serving size. But the starting point is gaining a deeper understanding of what priority shoppers want.
Targeting Highest-Value Segments
The power of these new shopper insights extends far beyond traditional relationship marketing. Using personalized transactional data to target one-to-one communications has long been standard procedure for any retailer with a reasonably good loyalty program. Now, guided by expert analytics, it’s possible to identify four or five key segments within a measurable tier of best shoppers and then fine-tune every aspect of the retail experience to suit their needs and preferences.
Retailers who’ve embraced the new analytics are tailoring promotions with more specificity than ever before. They’re learning that their best shoppers may not have the same priorities or brand affiliations as consumers generally. For example, these high-value shoppers may show a surprising lack of price sensitivity in some categories, or they may make unexpected connections across categories in arriving at a purchase decision.
In this new shopper-centric landscape, manufacturers face a critical question: How do you go to market with a portfolio of national brands if every retailer is going to develop a different set of high-value shopper segments and a different set of approaches to address each segment’s unique needs? The answer is to work closely with retail partners – starting with key accounts – to tackle the enormous challenge of incorporating shopper-based analytics into category and brand management. This article will try to provide some helpful perspectives on how that can ideally be achieved.
But ahead of any specific collaborations in sharing data or pushing the boundaries of brand-centric thinking, manufacturers and retailers first have to achieve a meeting of minds around common goals and the best routes for reaching them. Because while no one is suggesting that all established approaches will be swept away in this new wave of shopper-focused retailing, there’s no question that the game is fundamentally changing.
What’s required is a new kind of relationship, at the highest strategic level, between manufacturers and their key retail partners.
Working together to develop new strategies, retailers and manufacturers both want the same thing. The parallel goals of market share and category share converge in the ability to profitably change the behavior of individual shoppers – measured by share of basket and wallet.
As they get to know their best shoppers better than ever, retailers are using those insights to rethink every aspect of how they do business. Manufacturers, in order to stay relevant to their retail customers, will have to incorporate the same kind of shopper-based analysis into their established models for driving brand and category growth. In turn, retailers will get even more mileage from their shopper information by tapping into the talent and resources of CPGs that have invested heavily in analytical horsepower
Both partners understand a fundamental truth: the categories that count most in retail are those that generate the most demand. In the absence of deeper insights, the best way to gauge the relative impact of categories is by analyzing sales in every way possible while reading the results against broader assessments of consumer preferences.
Now retailers have the ability to identify precisely the most profitable segments shopping at particular store formats and individual locations. They can use shopper insights to craft more effective promotion and pricing strategies, and also to tailor merchandising techniques and store designs to fit the needs and tastes of shoppers who will yield the highest returns.
Forging Stronger Dialogue
Manufacturers have a central part to play in the shopper-focused enterprise, not simply aligning brand and category decisions with retailers’ new insight-driven approaches but working alongside them to develop comprehensive strategies.
CPGs hoping to increase their influence with key accounts must start incorporating those retailers’ shopper data into their recommendations. By weaving deeper insights into their strategies, manufacturers can play a more central role in areas where historically they’ve been on the periphery. They can exert more influence on pricing decisions, accelerate the pace of assortment changes and raise the overall ROI on promotional analytics – all by rethinking the building blocks of category management in light of what shoppers want.
Manufacturers who fail to shore up their skills and thought leadership in this area risk falling behind and losing their status as category captains or valued advisors. To work together effectively, manufacturers and retailers have to overcome any past hesitation to share proprietary data. Those who have their eyes on the horizon understand that a fruitful dialogue does not begin with “What are you going to do for me?”
The question that counts is “What are we going to do together to win those key shopper segments?” And unless that win is three-way, with the shopper front and center, everyone loses.
Of course, all of this sounds good in concept. Indeed, the kind of revolutionary change we’re talking about begins at the conceptual level, where brand strategy and the vision for a category are redefined through the lens of customer insight. But the full impact only becomes clear when we focus in on the points where strategy translates into tactics – in the aisles and on
the shelves.
Beyond Traditional Forecasting
While a handful of leading retailers have been pursuing shopper-focused strategies aggressively, we’re still in the early days of this transition. Manufacturers have a huge opportunity to take the lead in a movement that is, at most, a step or two above the ground floor.
In its recently published Retailer-Direct Data Report, the Grocery Manufacturers Association confirms that the majority of mass retailers are sharing unprecedented quantities of data with suppliers. What is striking about the report is the degree to which it focuses on data sharing related to inventory and supply chain issues. In its discussion of marketing applications, the emphasis is on promotional strategies driven by sensed demand – that is, on real-time, product-centric information indicating what items are out of stock or moving too slowly through distribution channels.
Supply-chain data is critical to effective retailing Strategies. But in the realm of shopper-focused promotions, while there’s clearly a need to know what’s in the store, it’s far more crucial to understand who’s buying what and why. Indeed, as manufacturers and retailers bring more shopper insights to their collaborative strategies, the inventory control sheet is just one of many familiar tools that will become less decisive in determining strategy.
In the old world, a promotion for cheese would be keyed to the forecasted sales volumes for each store. In the new world of shopper insights, a promotion might focus on specific cheese varieties and pair them with, say, gourmet olive oils – because that’s what will most likely attract high-value shoppers.
Insights to Fine-Tune Pricing
Let’s look at how adopting the shopper perspective changes one of the fundamentals of category management: pricing.
Retailers’ lives have already been made a lot easier by price-optimization software. They can use computer-generated models to calculate elasticity and correlate that information with cost and inventory data to arrive at ideal pricing strategies.
Now these powerful analytical tools, based on general transactional data, can be augmented with shopper-focused analytics to bring even more precision to forecasts and planning. A retailer can identify key value items (KVIs) on which priority customers show the most price sensitivity, as well as those that offer opportunities for reclaiming margin and increasing revenue – while maintaining the overall price position in the marketplace.
The pricing solutions shaped by shopper analytics are often unexpected. A leading manufacturer recently sought help in determining whether the pricing strategy of one of its grocery partners was yielding optimal results. Analysts conducted a thorough assessment using shopper purchase data and were able to rank the importance of every item in the category to the grocer’s highest-value shoppers. They also identified price sensitivities around specific items. Many items that were very price-sensitive for priority shoppers were in fact fixed relatively high compared to the retailer’s competition. To improve price perception and strengthen the loyalty of a key segment, the grocer implemented an everyday low pricing strategy for these items.
On the other hand, there were many items that best shoppers considered important but appeared to purchase regardless of price – yet these items had been subject to everyday low pricing. The recommendation: price these items higher and promote discounts only when trying to boost traffic among less frequent shoppers.
Shopper-focused analyses have shown that 20 to 50% of the items on a retailer’s shelves have virtually no price sensitivity among best shoppers. By following the old route of identifying KVIs and then indexing to meet or beat competitors’ prices, retailers may be throwing away margin with no appreciable benefit.
In a fiercely competitive environment where price is the first point of differentiation, retailers need the precision that comes with understanding deeply who their core shoppers are and what they value most. Going forward, pricing strategy will increasingly be fine-tuned to reflect the sensitivities of priority shoppers – while continuing to align with a retailer’s competitive price index and overall price positioning and image.
Manufacturers will have to weave the same understanding into their pricing recommendations, applying shopper insights to refine analyses and rethink old assumptions. A CPG’s ability to speak the language of shopper insights and make suggestions that are easy to implement will open doors to new conversations with retailers.
Keying Product Assortments
Traditionally, retailers and manufacturers have determined product assortment using simple ranking reports, often augmented by consumer research. While this approach ensures that popular or profitable items remain listed, it does nothing to align product selection with the tastes and interests of those shoppers who matter most.
Simplifying assortment by reducing the total number of SKUs is a worthy ambition, but not if it means inadvertently deleting items preferred by high-value shoppers. The answer is to systematically scrutinize the baskets of best shoppers to understand which items are uniquely important to them.
The findings are often counterintuitive – and can yield dramatic results. The recent experience of a major cereal manufacturer illustrates the point: As a category captain, the company was asked to make recommendations on listing, de-listing and adding items in a grocery retailer’s cereal assortment. In addition to reviewing sales and profit rankings, the manufacturer commissioned an analytical study to determine which items were important to the retailer’s best shoppers. It emerged that one cereal item, despite being ranked in the bottom 6% for its contribution to category sales, was in fact purchased by 80% of priority shoppers. The manufacturer naturally recommended that this item be retained.
Sales and profit rankings are essential for determining a core product assortment. But
decision-making around which items should be listed or de-listed is significantly enhanced
with shopper-focused insights. Rationalizing SKUs based on these insights not only improves category sales; it can help a retailer retain or gain unique shopping trips while also boosting cross-category sales, creating stronger differentiation and growing overall loyalty. Manufacturers can work alongside their retail partners to sharpen these shopper-driven assortment strategies, bringing their unique understanding of brand to a new set of preference-based metrics.
Smarter Products
For manufacturers, introducing new products into the marketplace follows a familiar pattern: After all the research and prototyping and focus groups are complete, you launch and then cross your fingers as you try to gauge how much volume you’re achieving and where.
Here again, shopper analytics change everything. Now it’s possible to see how a new product is faring not just with all shoppers but with those whom a retailer values most. Transactional and loyalty data can be used to track best-shopper behaviors over time, monitoring the specifics of trials and repeats as a pattern unfolds. What’s more, the impact of a new product can be evaluated in relation to the total basket of a high-value shopper, illuminating how it correlates with and potentially influences (or is influenced by) other purchase decisions.
At the same time, shopper-focused insights can point to new product development opportunities. For example, if time-starved families are buying ready-to-eat meals, other items in their baskets may provide important clues for potential product extensions. They may be buying added ingredients or accompaniments that suggest how pre-prepared meals could be enhanced to suit their tastes. Similarly, their apparent preference for a competitor’s product within the category, or their choice of size or format in related categories, can all be valuable signposts pointing the way to creating new products.
So far this article has examined how shopper-focused strategies are changing the
game for retailers and their CPG partners. Next month, Part Two looks at how manufacturers can better prepare for, and profit from, the shopper-centric revolution.
Win Weber is chairman and CEO of Winston Weber & Associates (winweber@winstonweber.com). Brian Ross is general manager of Precima (bross@precima.com).
JUNE 2010
New Technology Enables CPGs
To Read Minds of Shoppers
By Dale Buss
It’s about to get a lot easier for CPG companies and retailers to read the minds of shoppers while they’re shopping -- literally. And in the case of this new capability – being fueled by a technology partnership between SymphonyIRI Group and the neuroscience company EmSense -- it’s likely that all the parties involved can emerge as big winners.
Chicago-based SymphonyIRI and San Francisco-based EmSense are integrating the former’s command of test-marketing CPG products and retail concepts with the latter’s high-tech, brainwave-reading head sets to give their clients highly granular, real-time information about how shoppers react physiologically and emotionally to particular packaging, merchandising, POS materials, colors – even price tags.
The new capability could help CPG companies and retailer customers adjust within a week or two to something they’ve learned about shopper reactions rather than have to wait two or three months until they learn enough to make such a refinement, said J.P. Beauchamp, senior vice president of consumer and shopper insights for SymphonyIRI. And the new program will allow them to make alterations while products and marketing are still in test markets rather than after they’ve rolled out – a huge advantage.
“We wanted to be able to gauge some of the other attributes around consumer data, and psychological and physical responses, that we might not see just looking at sales data,” Beauchamp said. “It provides an interesting series of attributes to give our mutual clients in the context of a test market with real products being tested in real grocery stores.”
EmSense works with other types of marketing and research concerns, but its partnership with SymphonyIRI is the first under which the company’s headsets will be used to gather shopper data across a wide variety of CPG brands and products at the same time. EmSense’s capabilities are being integrated with SymphonyIRI’s existing BehaviorScan program in four test markets -- Eau Claire, Wis.; Grand Junction, Colo.; Pittsfield, Mass.; and Cedar Rapids, Iowa – where the SymphonyIRI company already offers clients sophisticated measurements of how local shoppers react to new products, packaging and other marketing stimuli in retail stores, and in their consumption of marketing messages.
The head sets are shaped like thin plastic head bands. They read brain waves and monitor breathing, heart rate, blinking, head movement and skin temperature of consumers to measure their emotional and cognitive responses to ads, new products and in-store conditions. Developed by a group of technologists from Hewlett-Packard’s research-and-development labs and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the EmSense head set combines EEG technology that measures brain-wave activity and biometric measures with proprietary algorithms through which the data is distilled into actionable insights.
EmSense has gauged the responses of nearly 50,000 individual shoppers so far. Typically, it gathers volunteers in-store by giving them a gift card for the participating retailer, encouraging test participation. After two or three minutes of calibrating the head set for each individual, the wireless devices track a shopper’s responses in real time as he or she proceeds up and down aisles, checking out products and price tags and POS banners and anything else they see.
Given that EmSense can record eye movements down to the detail of one square inch, there is no doubt exactly what the test subject is looking at when he or she reacts to a stimulus. And because EmSense measures brainwave activity at the rate of 20,000 times per second, it’s a completely accurate reflection of an individual’s reactions.
“These are instantaneous, visceral, subconscious reactions we’re measuring,” said Mark Mallardi, senior vice president of sales and marketing for EmSense. “By the time you’ve thought about it and intellectualized it, we’ve already got the readout.”
The key is that EmSense is able to match eye movements and emotional and cognitive reactions to what the eye is actually looking at. “We contribute direct measurement of the level of emotional engagement with a new product on the shelf and the degree to which they’re cognitively engaged with it as well,” Mallardi said. “Are they emotionally reacting, either positively or negatively, and are they actively intellectually engaged with the product? Those are two of the key influencers on a shopper’s purchase or rejection decision.”
The applications extend innumerably. CPG marketers can gauge how shoppers react to products at first glance; then, as they become engaged with a product, whether they respond positively or negatively to particulars such as front-of-package labeling, and to nutritional information and other things on the back of a package as they turn it.
Retailers will want to know how shoppers react to a price tag, for example, or to a POS display, or to a floor graphic. EmSense also will be able to give retailers and CPG category-management partners a “heat map” of the intensity and types of emotional and cognitive reactions by shoppers to product adjacencies, for instance.
“With that information, we can isolate instances where the adjacency of two different sets of items – for whatever reasons – caused negative reactions; maybe there were too many SKUs on the shelf or the adjacency didn’t make sense,” Mallardi said. “That can cause people to think too hard about it or react negatively to what they’re seeing.”
So far, retailers also have expressed particular interest in learning from the BehaviorScan and EmSense partnership how shoppers react to end-aisle displays and to specific products and merchandising elements included in them. They’re also intrigued to learn about shopper reactions to the many changes on store perimeters and how they might apply to the center store. Another area of big interest by retailers these days is front-of-store impulse purchases; the EmSense system can teach clients a lot about how impulse purchases are made near
the checkouts.
SymphonyIRI’s Beauchamp said that his company’s sales data is “rich and robust” but noted that “it takes time” for manufacturers and retailers to have enough data to learn from. The EmSense system, he said, “provides opportunities for [clients] to identify issues and look for ways they can course-correct in test markets versus live markets. And that can make a huge difference in the costs and in the success of what they’re trying to do.”
Market Watch
Collaborative Software Solution
Delivers Insights at Point of Decision
By Lynne Cooke
A new software solution has been introduced to help companies better understand
shopper behavior and collaborate with their trading partners to make better decisions using those insights.
The solution, called DemandTec Shopper Insights, is available from DemandTec, a leading provider of on-demand optimization solutions for retailers and consumer products companies. The solution is now available to DemandTec’s community of customers on the DemandTec TradePoint Network.
“Retailers and their trading partners can no longer succeed by broad-brushing markets and treating all shoppers the same. Using shopper insights to jointly develop more targeted merchandising and trade plans is critical to gain market share,” said Lora Cecere, partner at Altimeter Group.
The newest development in DemandTec’s nextGEN strategy, DemandTec Shopper Insights provides retailers and consumer products companies with a breakdown of sales trends by penetration and buy-rate, shopping trip statistics, and more. Using shopper insight dashboards and insights embedded directly within the workflows of DemandTec’s other software services, merchants and marketers will be able to quickly identify new opportunities to target specific shopper segments with more tailored assortments, promotions and pricing.
The DemandTec Shopper Insights solution includes:
1. Shopper Insight-on-DemandTec A software service that delivers shopper and segment
insights embedded within the workflows of DemandTec’s merchandising and trade
optimization software services. It also provides retailers with an online library of shopper
insight dashboards for additional research and the ability to share those insights with
consumer product companies on the DemandTec TradePoint Network.
2. Shopper Segmentation An analytical service enabling retailers to create, modify, or
enhance shopper segmentation schemes and maintain them over time as household
buying behavior and assortments change.
To achieve the scalability and performance necessary for this solution, DemandTec has partnered with Netezza, a provider of high volume, high availability data warehousing appliances and analytic solutions. DemandTec Shopper Insights services are designed for and are deployed on Netezza’s TwinFin appliance due to its ability to process high volume datasets including retail transaction logs and loyalty data. The need to deliver highly complex, contextual analytics at the point of decision is a critical strategic component for retailers
and manufacturers.
“The status quo for the industry has been static shopper insights delivered by armies of expensive consultants and largely separate from the merchandising and marketing decisions being made,” said Marc Dietz, Vice President of Marketing for DemandTec. “DemandTec is changing the status quo by providing software-based shopper insights where they matter most – at the point of decision.”
The DemandTec Shopper Insights solution will be featured at DemandTec’s eighth annual customer conference, where shopper segmentation, collaborative reporting dashboards and embedded shopper analytics will be discussed in detail.
Shopping with a Plan
Shoppers who clip coupons and that their trips to the grocery store are more likely to spend more money, according to survey from Henkel, maker of such household brands as Dial soap.
Coupon clippers on average spent more than $7,100 last year. According to the study, these shoppers make up a quarter of U.S. households, but account for 31% of spending on packaged goods last year. Not many shoppers with a plan frequent new stores.
Healthy Nation
More than eight of ten (85%) Americans consider their lifestyle to be healthy, according to a survey by the American Public Health Association.
“The trend of Americans making healthier lifestyle changes, such as eating better and exercising more, shows that the U.S. population is taking the necessary steps to becoming a healthier nation,” stated Georges Benjamin, executive director of APHA. “Americans need to ‘start small, think big,’ in transforming our nation into a healthier nation. Individuals recognize that their personal changes can result in broader community impact.
