Your customer's health IQ just lapped your marketing. John Scheer on why the smartest health brands are rethinking everything.

This week on The Marketing Factor, I talked with John Scheer, chief creative officer and co-founder of Herman-Scheer, a strategic brand consultancy that went all-in on healthcare, self-care, and wellbeing three years ago. I've been following their work for a long time, they've always done great creative, but the niche-down is what really caught my attention.

John's been in the trenches building brands for 15 years, from walking up and down Sunset Boulevard with a laptop pitching hotel videos to now working with disruptive healthcare startups, CPG supplement brands, fitness, food & bev, and health tech. His perspective on where the health and wellness space is headed is sharp, and there are real takeaways here for anyone in ecommerce or DTC.

You can catch the episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.

Herman Scheer's 15-Year Journey to Healthcare Branding Mastery | John Scheer

Your first 500 customers talk about you more than your next 5,000, but they can't evangelize something confusing

If your early customers can't explain what you do clearly to someone else, your positioning has a problem. He used Bobbie, the European-inspired baby formula brand, as an example. They've stayed laser-focused on who they are, never straying into a product roadmap that would blur that position. And now competitors are chasing them.

The brands that win early loyalty don't just have good products, they have a story that's easy to repeat.

Whatever used to be on the back of the pack now needs to be on the front

Democratization of healthcare

Consumer health IQ has gone way up in the last five to ten years. People know what magnesium does. They know what bioavailability means. John shared the example of his client The Absorption Company, they launched with benefit-forward products like Calm, Energy, Restore, and Sleep. But their customers came back and said, "Just give me the magnesium. Just give me the berberine." So they launched a whole line of single-ingredient foundational supplements. The benefit-first facade isn't as necessary anymore because people actually understand what these ingredients do.

If your brand is still hiding behind vague benefit language when your customer already speaks the science, you're underestimating them.

AI is a TI-83 Plus, not a creative director

John said his team used to do work like long division by hand, and now they have a TI-83 Plus. AI helps them consolidate research, draft early messaging, find inconsistencies in stakeholder inputs. But he's also getting AI slop back from clients on intake questionnaires, people are dumping their forms into ChatGPT and sending back incomprehensible answers.

AI lets you skip the busy work, but the pre-production and direction still have to come from a human. It's not a one-button finished asset.

The AG1 problem is coming for every recurring product

AG1 just got hit with a clinical study questioning the efficacy of their product. At $80/month, that's a real exposure. Brands are going to have to show a timeline of what their product actually does for you from week one, to month three, to year two. If you're telling someone to take something daily, they want to know what it's doing on a cellular level from day one all the way to year three. That's the new bar.

Any brand selling a recurring product needs to articulate compounding value over time.