Editor’s note: Herbalife Nutrition is the winner of the 2022 Global Marketing Research Project Award which is a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. To find out more about the awards click here. 

Since 1980, Herbalife Nutrition has sought to change lives around the world by providing nutrition products, with an emphasis on weight loss. Over time, the company’s role has evolved to include holistic wellness. In 2021, Herbalife Nutrition began redefining its brand positioning. The company conducted over 18,000 interviews in more than 25 countries to discover the important brand truths, identify a brand positioning statement and guide the development of a brand manifesto and tagline that supported the brand’s creative direction. The new brand positioning received enthusiastic collective buy-in from company leadership and key stakeholders worldwide. 

Executive leadership, distributors and employees felt that the Herbalife Nutrition brand had to be modernized and have a clearer meaning. With key stakeholders galvanized for change, global consumer and member insights were able to leverage that support to forge committed partnerships with stakeholders and leadership. 

Global consumer and member insights and global marketing worked in close collaboration to design a research plan that would obtain insights from multiple stakeholder groups, including executive leadership, distributors, customers and employees. This process leveraged multiple methodologies, including landscape assessment, emotional and narrative inquiry, co-creation workshops, online discussions in the company’s proprietary online community and a global quantitative brand positioning study. 

Herbalife Nutrition’s worldwide presence in more than 90 countries was important to ensure that the new brand positioning was relevant to all stakeholders. This necessitated a truly global approach that used multiple meth...