Is There any Hope for the Dietary Supplement Industry?

(Posted by Patrick Sullivan Jr.)

Marc Ulman is one of the most respected lawyers in the Dietary Supplement business. Among dozens of other accomplishments and accolades, he is the lead counsel of the Dietary Supplement Education Alliance, which is how I met him.

Yesterday he wrote Attacks on the Industry — How Should We Respond? questioning how to best respond to two recent attacks on the Dietary Supplement Industry.

I posted the following comment to that post (don’t know why it’s showing up as private comment??):

Good question Marc. I contest that the long-term answer is what kept
my company (Jigsaw Health) from being approved as a member of DSEA –
un-redacted customer product reviews on the same page as the Buy Now
button.

Allow me to explain…

Jupiter Research found 79% of consumers looked for product reviews when shopping online. And what’s the first thing any of us look for when buying a product on Amazon?? Yep…we all scroll down to the customer reviews.

And I would challenge that when we put our own consumer hat on, we all want to read positive *and* negative reviews. It gives us a balanced look from the actual users of the product.

Let’s face it, consumers care less and less what we as manufacturers/marketers say about our own products. And this is true in EVERY single industry. So all industries, dietary supplement marketers included, need to learn to let a product live or die based on what customers *honestly* say about their product.

Let’s STOP posting customer testimonials that have been edited to be DSHEA-friendly. Why? Someone with high blood pressure is NOT looking for a product that "promotes healthy blood flow." There’s too much of a disconnect in terminology.

But if someone buys a magnesium supplement and writes an honest review that their BP went from one-eighty over ninety-five to one-twenty over eighty in 2 weeks, why should the manufacturer live in constant fear of the FDA/FTC?

SUMMARY: The way to beat the constant media bias against dietary supplements in the long-term is to just go around them and allow consumers to connect to each other with unbiased, un-redacted product reviews in the same location as the Buy Now button. (Then, it’s up to us to kill our crappy products once bad reviews come in.)

Btw Marc, we met on the show floor of Product Expo in Vegas last year and you explained to me that Jigsaw Health was too much of a risk for DSEA primarily because of our customer product reviews on the Buy Now page. I completely understand your position, and I still respect your decision. I assure you, I’m not upset about not being included. So this comment was not written out of spite, but rather as 3-year newbie to the dietary supplement industry respectfully attempting to challenge the long-help positions of the "Old Guard."

Also, I shared this "let customers say whatever they want on our online sales pages" idea on January 16th with Congressman Pallone in a room with other industry leaders, including Jon Benninger from Virgo Publishing, Dr. Paul Mittman of SCNM.edu, etc.

I’m sure there will be many ideas on how to launch a short-term counter attack. For my two cents, I recommend the hypocrisy approach:

The landmark “Life…supplemented” Healthcare Professionals (HCP) Impact Study found that more than three quarters of U.S. physicians (79 percent) and nurses (82 percent) recommend dietary supplements to their patients. The study also shows that an almost equal number—72 percent of physicians and 89 percent of nurses—personally use vitamin, mineral, herbal and other supplements either regularly, occasionally or seasonally, which is a higher percentage than the 68 percent of adults who report they take nutritional or dietary supplements.

Patrick Sullivan Jr.
President & Co-founder

Jigsaw Health, LLC
15863 N. Greenway-Hayden Loop, Ste 120
Scottsdale, AZ 85260
www.JigsawHealth.com/Patrick