Speculative Health Applied® concept by KVA
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When people think about physical health, they tend to think about gym memberships, fitness apps, protein shakes, and structured workout plans. The fitness industry has done a brilliant job of owning what movement looks like, and in doing so, it has also done something it probably never intended: it has made physical health feel like something you either commit to fully or aren't really doing at all.
That framing leaves a lot of people out. Right now, only 18% of UK adults hold a gym membership, which means 82% of the population sits largely outside the primary channel through which physical health is marketed, messaged, and motivated. That's not a niche group. That's most people. And yet most of those people are moving. They're carrying shopping, assembling furniture, walking around supermarkets, doing the garden, hauling things up stairs, and spending weekends in DIY stores. None of it gets counted, categorised, or celebrated as physical activity, even though research consistently shows that incidental movement, the kind you don't plan or schedule, is the predominant source of physical activity for the majority of adults.
A 2023 Lancet Public Health study went further, finding that as little as 2 to 3 minutes of vigorous incidental activity per day is associated with substantially lower risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality. The body doesn't distinguish between a deadlift and a flat-pack. That was the thinking behind our latest Health Applied® thought experiment featuring @IKEA
A trip around IKEA often involves thousands of steps before you've touched a single product, navigating the warehouse, loading the trolley, carrying flat-packs to the car, and then assembling everything at home across a full day. Nobody calls it a workout, but physical activity doesn't stop being physical activity just because it happens somewhere unexpected.
What makes this interesting isn't just IKEA. It's the broader category of brands creating meaningful physical activity as a by-product of what they do, without ever intending to and without ever getting credit for it. Garden centres get people bending and digging for hours, DIY stores send people up ladders and across warehouses, and outdoor markets keep people on their feet all afternoon. None of these brands have claimed a role in physical health, and yet all of them are contributing to it in ways that a gym membership often doesn't.
So, if the brands with the biggest opportunity in physical health aren't fitness brands, are we marketing physical health to the wrong people through the wrong channels?
The fitness industry tends to speak to people who already believe movement is part of their identity. What's largely underserved is the much bigger group who are already moving through their daily lives but have never been given a reason to connect that movement to their health. The opportunity isn't to convert them into gym-goers. It's to help them recognise what they're already doing and build from there.
Brands often have permission to enter people's lives in ways healthcare organisations can't. And when a brand that nobody associates with fitness starts making the case that what you're already doing counts, people listen, because it doesn't ask them to change. It asks them to see themselves differently.
The brands that create the most value in the future may not be the ones with the best equipment or the most advanced tracking. They may be the ones with the imagination to recognise the health value they're already creating, and the confidence to own it.
That's the thinking behind Health Applied®. Finding health value where others aren't looking.
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