Menopause Marketing
Buyer beware: menopause marketing is a growing, multibillion dollar industry.
Welcome back to Menopause Monday, a weekly series where I aim to educate, advocate and destigmatize menopause to help women claim power in aging. Whether you’re going through menopause or meno-curious, welcome!
Let’s face it: who doesn’t want a magic bullet when faced with night sweats and anxiety? After getting my perimenopause diagnosis, I went to Costco to stalk up on calcium and magnesium supplements. Then I did what any woman in her late thirties with some disposable income would do to take control of her life: I scanned the aisles for products that would solve my latest midlife problem.
Across from the bottles of Vitamin C, I found Estroven. Let me tell you, the marketing was spot on. Estroven promised the world: better sleep, better sex, better mood. It was only $30, but there were also only 30 pills. My lizard brain did the math, and then it told me to Google: is Estroven Safe. Moments later, feeling wiser, I put the bottle back.
I am wired to fact check everything and to process my trauma by writing about what I went through so that I can help someone else with what I now know. Menopause Marketing did not get me that day, but holding that bottle of Estroven with all of its promises certainly made me feel like a different kind of prey.
The menopause market is estimated to be $16 billion by 2025, which means that women’s midlife is now ripe for marketing opportunities and of course scams. There will be products that help open up the conversation about menopause, but there will be even more brands and influencers slinging snake oil in the form of a menopause course or a supplement made with a proprietary blend (read: the consumer has no idea what’s actually in the pill and no way to verify whether it will help or harm their body).
In the realm of products that help, there are women disrupting the menopause market with ambitious projects designed to educate or supplement clinical care such as Elektra Health, a membership-based telehealth program especially for women in midlife. But it is not cheap. As with so many women’s issues, how we experience perimenopause and menopause have everything to do with our access to resources, and our ability to pay for them.
Since I started going through perimenopause in my early days of motherhood, I often think of the vulnerability I felt as a new mom when I look at how my social media algorithms have adjusted marketing to my new bodily norms.
From my view, Menopause Marketing is an extension of Momfluencer Marketing, a multibillion dollar industry that author Sara Petersen explains is thriving because without access to resources, mothers turn to social media for help. In searching for parenting tips, content that normalizes mom rage, toddler activities and mom style, moms end up following accounts that promote and financially profit off the concept of ideal motherhood. In other words, momfluencers leverage a mothers’ vulnerability and fear that she isn’t a good enough mother to sell us products and services. To be fair, Petersen doesn’t blame most momfluencers who are just trying to pay their bills; she places blame on systemic issues like the lack of federally mandated paid family leave that cause women to desire work/life balance and to later sell their followers on their own private yearnings.
But the systemic issues driving women’s fear doesn’t end with motherhood, just as womanhood doesn’t end with a baby. The issues women face follow us into midlife.
As someone for whom early motherhood wasn’t that long ago, I can’t help but feel that I’m now being sold scams to alleviate my midlife problems. My dance with Estroven was only the beginning. I’ve since seen countless more supplements on Instagram, CVS and Target. All of them hold similar promises which, if you’re up with insomnia in the middle of the night you might be inclined to believe and buy. Menopause Marketing, like Momfluencing, speaks to women’s vulnerability for profit.
Alleviating symptoms of perimenopause requires access to resources, without which we become vulnerable to the solutions we can afford. I know this all too well because my symptoms went undiagnosed for four years. Without knowing I needed help, I suffered from depression, anxiety, insomnia, and fatigue and was told I was just experiencing matrescence, or just adjusting to my new life.
Therapy and family support where significant resources I relied on, but the actual perimenopause treatment I started a month ago has been the thing that’s helped me fully climb out of my despair. I take calcium citrate and magnesium glycinate supplements which I was advised to do in a general Menopause Onboarding email my gynecologist sent after speaking with me about menopause over the phone. Apparently, your body needs magnesium to absorb a calcium supplement, but magnesium can also help with insomnia and anxiety.
Looking back, I realize I was motivated to purchase Estroven because learning I was in perimenopause sent me into bereavement. One day I was thirty-eight, still in my childbearing years which meant that I had at least one more road not taken than I do now. Then suddenly, I was thirty-eight and in perimenopause and my family size was decided for me by my biology, and my biology was reminding me of my mortality.
At first, the little I knew about menopause frightened me, but the biggest terror was that I couldn’t reverse or stop the ending to a season of my life on my own time. Our culture doesn’t celebrate women aging. Menopause Marketing can disrupt the stigmas of midlife, but right now it is unfortunately the consumer’s job to know what is real and what is a myth. Identifying and amplifying the difference is a step toward the midlife empowerment we all deserve.
I’m curious what is the biggest myth you were told about midlife? What would you tell your younger self about this lie? If you have a thought, please share it. You might help one of the hundreds of subscribers who read this newsletter!
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