Herbalife needed to build relevance with younger consumers — particularly in the German market — where conventional supplement messaging was failing to connect. The brand's traditional positioning around weight management and nutrition was not resonating with a Gen Z audience that engaged with health and wellness through an entirely different cultural lens.
Vivaldi developed a repositioning strategy that used humor, cultural moments, and viral content tactics to reach younger health consumers more authentically. A segmentation framework and growth roadmap defined how Herbalife could expand its consumer base beyond its traditional distributor-driven model.
The repositioning strategy provided Herbalife with a credible path to engaging younger consumer segments — and a growth roadmap that defined how to evolve the brand from a supplement-focused identity toward a holistic wellness positioning better suited to modern consumer values.
Herbalife engaged Vivaldi to build relevance with younger consumers in the German market, where conventional supplement messaging was failing to land with a Gen Z audience that engages with health through an entirely different cultural lens. Vivaldi delivered a repositioning strategy built on humor, cultural moments, and viral content tactics, alongside a segmentation framework and growth roadma
Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. is a global multi-level marketing company and nutrition brand with revenues exceeding $5 billion and operations in over 90 countries. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, Herbalife markets a range of nutrition, weight management, and personal care products through a network of approximately 4.5 million independent distributors. The company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker HLF.
Vivaldi reframed Herbalife’s positioning away from weight management and supplement messaging toward a holistic wellness identity that could land with Gen Z consumers, then built a segmentation framework and growth roadmap for moving the business beyond its distributor-driven model. The strategy gave Herbalife a credible route into a consumer base that conventional supplement marketing had been missing.
The team grounded the work in how German Gen Z consumers actually engage with wellness, through humor, cultural moments, and short-form viral content, rather than through the functional benefit claims supplement brands have traditionally led with. Translating Herbalife’s product credentials into that register gave the brand permission to participate in cultural conversations it had previously been excluded from.
Older cohorts respond to functional claims tied to specific health outcomes, while Gen Z treats wellness as part of identity and self-expression, which makes claim-led marketing feel transactional and outdated. A brand that cannot show up in cultural conversation, with the tone Gen Z uses, is structurally invisible to that cohort even if its product is competitive on every functional metric.
The lesson is that reaching Gen Z is rarely a media problem, it is a positioning and tone problem that no amount of paid reach will solve. A brand that wants relevance with younger health consumers has to rebuild the message and the cultural register before it spends meaningful budget on distribution, otherwise it ends up paying to broadcast content the audience has already learned to filter out.
