In this series, we ask top industry execs and marketers from across the country about their biggest fears and concerns. What is giving top marketers fitful sleeps these days? This week, we caught up with Eric Bentz, Jamieson Wellness’s EVP of global marketing and managing director for Canada. Bentz is responsible for consumer marketing, consumer insights and go-to-market execution across the company’s 50-plus markets.

What’s keeping you up at night?

Emerging technologies are accelerating the pace of change in marketing at a historically high rate. It’s now trickier to stay focused on age-old brand fundamentals while keeping up with influences of change.

At Jamieson, we are trying to achieve a balance. We are getting clear on what technologies and changes are meaningful to us as marketers so we can better understand how they fit into our roles and overall plans. There’s a lot of noise out there, and we want to avoid chasing fads that don’t materialize into anything impactful.

The obvious influence of the day is AI, but its potential is so massive that it can be hard to make sense of it. That’s why we are taking a test-and-learn approach. We are using AI in our creative process and sharing out both successes and failures with our team.

We are also experimenting with AI and search. Google’s dominance in search has long felt impenetrable, but AI is disrupting its hold. Search is starting to fragment in North America, and we will soon likely enter a world where consumers move from searching to asking, potentially trusting both AI and community answers over links.

As marketers, our role will always be to move consumers down the brand funnel. New trends or technologies won’t change that, but they may present opportunities to accelerate the process.

How are younger consumers’ concerns for healthy living – reflected in vegan diets or trends such as sober October – affecting your role and the business as a whole?

Health and wellness is definitely a priority for millennials and Gen Z, and our global data shows they are spending more on this category than any other generation in history.

It’s inspiring to see younger people being proactive about their health. Heck, when I was younger my friends and I may have been a little too focused on things that were bad for our health, so we’re witnessing a positive generational change.

This emerging global health and wellness megatrend is pushing the industry in new directions, and all demographics will benefit from the resulting innovation.

For Jamieson, this trend is informing our innovation and marketing-mix choices. We have seen interest in an ingredient like magnesium skyrocket, which has absolutely been driven by younger consumers looking for new ways to manage stress and sleep better. When it comes to marketing mix, [vitamins, minerals and supplements brand] VMS has historically taken a traditional approach, but now the entire industry is evolving. Leading brands like Jamieson are leveraging the power of influencers, focusing on Amazon brand building, heavily leaning into TikTok and Instagram and using direct-to-consumer data and relationships to build stronger connections with consumers.

While we may have been slower to adopt these approaches, we caught up quickly and closed the gap. We now have sophisticated planning and execution in these areas. We are well adjusted to the demands of a well-educated and dynamic younger consumer.

How did your brand-refresh strategy from last year fare?

Thanks for remembering! As strategy kindly covered in 2024, our refresh was an opportunity to move from years of conventional category advertising to a [global] campaign approach that gave our brand more meaning.

Our goal was to build on our incredible brand salience while also connecting Jamieson to an attribute consumers care a lot about, which is quality.

Our resulting campaign idea was thereby built around sharing behind-the-scenes stories about how Jamieson goes above and beyond when it comes to quality. For us, it was essential to use real team members to tell the real stories. We are truly an organization of people who care about quality and our standards are among the best in the world.

The campaign tested exceptionally well with Canadian consumers and in our key international markets. We also had a lot of fun with the campaign on our social channels, telling plenty of stories in a cost-effective way. What’s also neat is that the social posts with the strongest engagement are becoming candidates for our next major execution, allowing data and variety to drive our brand decisions.

One challenge we have wrestled with is how to tell product stories through this campaign idea. The original campaign was all about the Jamieson brand, but we are now finding new ways to tell specific product stories. It took us a while to find a balance between tactical messaging and brand storytelling and I appreciate how resilient our team and our agency partner have been as we figured out the right approach. We are excited to share the results soon.

Would you say the ‘buy Canadian’ movement affects your space to a similar extent it does food and other CPGs?

It does, and it’s been rewarding to participate in the movement. Canadians are eager to support all things Canadian right now – products, ideas, jobs, and economic spinoff – and as a proudly Canadian company, Jamieson is humbled to be part of this movement.

We have also used the movement to take ourselves less seriously on social media and bring more fun to the Jamieson brand. As one example, our social team recognized the national pride rooted in the 4 Nations Face-Off hockey tournament in February, sharing a series of posts celebrating all things Canadian and showing appreciation for joining Canadians on their health and wellness journeys. This playful approach resulted in tons of engagement, and it encourages us to have more fun with our brand and explore new ideas and approaches to social. I am proud of our social-media team’s work on this front.

I also want to honour Maple Leaf Foods and its “Look for the Leaf” campaign, which called on Canadian brands to support each other. It’s a unique approach to celebrating Canada and we are glad to participate in their campaign.

What is something that marketers outside of the health, wellness and supplements space fail to appreciate about the particular concerns you have to deal with in the category?

Adjusting to the strict regulatory standards in the vitamins and supplements category is a learning curve for most marketers. In Canada, our category is regulated by the Natural Health Products Directorate. Health Canada created this framework years ago to ensure Canadians can be confident the products in our industry are safe, effective and of high quality.

As industry leaders in product quality, we completely support and comply with this regulatory framework. Marketers new to our team learn to partner with our science, technology and regulatory affairs teams to work within what they may initially see as constraints and create compelling brand and product stories that fully comply with regulations. It’s a good challenge and they become stronger marketers because of the experience.