🧪 Oura’s Positioning Pivot

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I haven’t shut up about the new Oura ring campaign since I saw it a few weeks ago. After Georgie Healy and I spoke about it on her podcast and got a positive response, I thought I’d explore in more detail how their brand has developed to this point and where they can go from here.

Hope you enjoy!

— Isaac

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Quick Hits

• YouTube wants to start conversations with Reddit-style comment threads [Tubefilter]

• PR trends you can’t ignore in 2025 [BuzzStream]

• The Case for Zero-Click Content in a Zero-Trust Ecosystem [SparkToro]

• How Nike lost Steph Curry to Under Armour [LinkedIn]

• Attention is the last scarce resource [Digital Native]

Oura’s Positioning Pivot

Wellness ads are identical. Young woman in activewear, glistening with perfectly placed sweat droplets. Cut to a shirtless guy doing burpees at sunrise. Another woman drinking a green smoothie, beaming with the kind of radiant energy that only exists in stock photography.

Every single ad looked like it came from the same creative brief. Same demographic. Same aesthetic. Same promise that youth = health, and health = happiness.

Then Oura launched their "Give Us the Finger" campaign.

Instead of twenty-something fitness models, there's a 70-year-old chess master mid-checkmate. A streetball legend in his 60s dominating NYC courts. Argentine tango dancers who've been performing together for four decades, moving with the kind of grace that only comes from years of practice.

It stopped me in my tracks because it was the first wellness ad I'd seen that looked like the future I actually wanted.

High-performance origins

But when an entire industry follows the same playbook for decades, everyone starts to sound identical. The assumption driving every wellness brand was “youth = aspirational“. Brands chase the same 18-35 demographic with identical visual language and fear-based messaging about "fighting" the aging process.

The thing about assumptions that go unquestioned for too long is they stop being strategic choices and become industry norms. Brands don't choose to target youth because they've analysed their market. They do it because “that's just how wellness marketing works”.

The question everything moment

The tagline "Live Fast, Die Old" perfectly captures this inversion. While everyone else sells the fantasy of eternal youth, Oura sells the reality of aging well.

As CMO Doug Sweeny explained "Gen Z and millennials are anxious about aging. Our perspective is that longevity is not just about the length of your life, it's about how well you are living your life, how healthy and happy you are at all stages."

That's not just different messaging. That's a fundamentally different worldview.

How to create breakthrough positioning

When Oura pivoted their approach to celebrate aging instead of fighting it, two powerful things happened.

Instant differentiation & community building

Being the only brand saying something makes you impossible to ignore. When every other wellness company shouts about youth and performance, celebrating wisdom and experience cuts through the noise instantly. There's no competition for that positioning because everyone else is fighting over the same crowded space.

This is differentiation through opposition rather than optimisation. Instead of trying to be 10% better at what everyone else is doing, Oura chose to do something completely different.

I've seen this principle work at smaller scales. In 2022, I was managing paid subscriptions at Australian media publisher Mamamia when we launched a fitness app. The market was crowded with platforms targeting high-performance twenty-somethings, but our audience research revealed something everyone else was missing. Our core demographic, women 35+ with family responsibilities, felt completely under-represented despite being very willing to pay for fitness content. Instead of competing for the saturated young demographic, we developed a fitness app specifically designed around the time constraints of busy mums. It drove roughly 3,000 new subscribers from the launch campaign alone, opening up an entirely new acquisition channel.

Authentic product-message alignment

The campaign wasn't just contrarian for the sake of being different. It emerged naturally from their product truth.

The Oura Ring sits on your finger, which already sets them apart in a market dominated by wristbands and smartwatches. While every other major fitness tracker, from Apple Watch to Fitbit to Whoop, fights for wrist real estate, Oura owns an entirely different piece of anatomy.

In this campaign, that finger placement isn't just functional, it's symbolic. When you "give someone the finger" in Oura's campaign, you're signalling membership in a community that chooses long-term health over short-term performance. Wisdom over youth. Intention over intensity.

The product design reinforces the brand positioning in a way that feels genuine rather than manufactured. They didn't invent a message and stick it onto their product. They looked at what their product naturally represented and built their message from there.

Finding your own assumption to challenge

Oura's success wasn't accidental. They systematically identified and challenged their industry's most fundamental assumption. Here's how you can do the same:

• Start with the industry playbook. What does every competitor assume to be true? In wellness, it was "youth = aspiration." In your category, it might be "cheaper = better" or "convenience > everything."

• Look for the ignored audience. Who is your industry systematically overlooking? Oura found millions of people over 35 who wanted wellness products but felt excluded by youth-obsessed marketing.

• Test the opposite. Once you've identified the assumption, ask what would happen if we believed the complete opposite? Not just a slightly different version, but the polar opposite.

• Find your authentic connection. Contrarian positioning only works if it connects to something genuine about your product or company. Oura's celebration of aging worked because their product is designed for long-term health monitoring, not quick fitness wins.

• Build conviction before execution. Half-hearted contrarian positioning feels like attention-seeking. Successful assumption-challenging requires deep conviction that the alternative approach is not just different, but better.

Oatly is another strong example. When they entered the US market, every dairy alternative positioned itself as a substitute for milk. Apologetic messaging said "we're not as good as the real thing, but we're healthier". Instead, Oatly challenged the fundamental assumption that cow's milk was "natural" for humans. They used provocative messaging like "It's like milk, but made for humans", turning the conversation upside down. Rather than apologising for being different, they celebrated it, transforming oat milk from niche health food into cultural movement.

The key is being contrarian with purpose, not just for shock value.

The most successful brands aren’t the ones that execute conventional wisdom slightly better. They're the ones brave enough to question what conventional wisdom has been missing.

So here's the challenge: What sacred assumption is your industry afraid to examine?

Because somewhere in that unquestioned belief system is your next breakthrough campaign. You just have to be willing to give conventional wisdom the finger.

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