For the final episode of Season One of Well Played: Conversations on Marketing and Brand, we're tackling a prickly one: What happens to the multi-million-dollar health and wellness industry when one class of drugs fundamentally changes a problem it has spent decades trying to solve?

GLP-1 medications aren't just changing conversations around weight loss. They're influencing the language of wellness, the businesses being built around it, the creators we're watching, the bodies we're seeing in campaigns and, potentially, our perception of what "healthy" looks like.

And what responsibility do marketers and brands have when there's money to be made from the shift?

For years, mainstream wellness messaging encouraged us to move our bodies, eat well, take our supplements, get our steps, improve our sleep and work on our gut health.

But somewhere along the way, wellness stopped being a category and became an identity.

Now GLP-1 medications are disrupting one of the largest commercial engines underneath the wellness industry: weight management.

We're not debating whether GLP-1 medications have an appropriate medical role — that's a conversation for patients and their healthcare professionals.

We're interested in the marketing and brand implications.

If consumer behaviour changes dramatically, what happens to the fitness programs, weight-loss businesses, supplements, food brands and influencers that built businesses around the old model?

And when a commercial opportunity emerges, where should brands draw the ethical line?

We unpack:

• GLP-1s and the changing wellness economy
• Sam Wood's Ollo for Women and the evolution of traditional fitness businesses, 28bySamWood
• SkinnyTok and the return of thinness online
• Body positivity, sizing and the responsibility of fashion brands
• Influencer transparency around weight loss
• Protein, creatine, NMN and wellness marketing
• Where brands should draw the ethical line
• Why LivEat offers a different model for health and wellness
• Gemma Diamond, Lisa DeSantis and Sophia Beg pushing back against shrinking body ideals
• Sydney Airport's response to Sophia Beg's gluten-free criticism in our final Well Played or No Played

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Until Season Two, play on.

Much love,

Kate & Esther.

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