Chinese consumers show a high future demand for practising meditation to improve emotion. 36% are interested in trying meditation in future, versus only 18% showing no future interest. This suggests that health improvement methods that highlight ‘mind relaxation’ are key opportunity areas to expand products/services distribution to connect with emotional health.

Consumers continuously experience stress and tiredness as the most common emotional issues. Overall, COVID-19 is not the single most crucial driver of emotional issues. Ongoing external factors like work and academic pressure and internal factors like sleep problems also have an impact.

In the wake of stressful surroundings, consumers are continuously seeking ways to improve emotion. Currently, most Chinese consumers prioritise making lifestyle changes over using products to improve mood, potentially leading to a passive situation of CPG sectors to tap into or expand product distribution in the emotional wellbeing market.

The good news is that the demand for comfort food and sensorial stimulation to manage emotional wellbeing is on consumers’ radar. This creates new opportunities in China’s CPG sectors to enter the emotional wellbeing management market. Brands and manufacturers can go beyond texture/taste/colour innovations of comfort food to include marketing comfort foods by creating specific emotive consumption occasions. They can also play up scent factors to meet consumers’ needs, such as exploring intriguing aromas to spark consumer imagination.

• Emotional wellbeing market overview for 2021

• Marketing strategies to watch

• Product and service innovations to watch

• Consumer behaviours and attitudes related to emotional wellbeing

• Perceptions of different types of comfort food and emotional wellbeing

• Scent and colour associations with emotional wellbeing

For the purposes of this Report, Mintel has used the following definitions:

Emotional wellbeing refers to consumers’ self-evaluation on a broad range of feelings, including stress, tiredness, lowness, anxiety, panic, short temper, depression and loneliness.

Products/services included in the overall scope of the Report:

• Packaged food and drinks

• Health supplements

• Household cleaning products

• Aromatherapy and essential oils

• Facial masks and eye masks

• Exercise, analysed separately as low intensity (eg yoga) and high-intensity exercise (eg CrossFit)

• Meditation

• Gaming

• Psychologist consultations

Products/services excluded:

• Products and services for medical treatment purposes in hospitals, such as antipsychotic drugs and psychiatrist consultations