Healthy Lifestyle Meaning Map: The Language of Health in Culture

How We Helped a Brand Speak to Its Audience More Precisely—In the Language of Its Cultural Codes

Healthy living is no longer a simple set of habits and has long moved beyond the “healthy/unhealthy” binary. Today, health is a complex system of meanings, roles, and expectations: some people choose food as a way of caring for themselves, others as a form of control, and others as an element of lifestyle and a sense of belonging to “their” people. The category has become multi-layered: the same words and visual cues can be read differently, and familiar communication formulas quickly lose precision and fade into the background.

VkusVill is one of the few brands in the market that treats this not as a “content topic,” but as the task of understanding people. To engage with its audience more accurately and avoid speaking “blindly,” the brand needed to see which cultural codes people actually use when they think about health—and how those codes show up in language, imagery, habits, and choice.

The task

To build a research foundation that helps VkusVill understand customers in the health space more deeply: to see which ideas and scenarios live in culture, how people describe self-care, how they make decisions, and which meanings they read in brands—so the team can act more precisely and confidently in communications and product decisions going forward.

The approach

We conducted a semiotic study—a way to understand what meanings people attach to the topic of health and how those meanings appear in language and imagery: in words, visuals, narratives, and recurring phrases. This lens helps distinguish surface-level formats and the current agenda from stable meaning structures that people use every day—even without naming them out loud.

In the course of the work, we collected and analysed a body of material from the cultural and media environment around healthy living, systematised patterns, compared them with one another, and shaped them into a structured map—a clear model that is convenient to use inside the team: to discuss, test, choose, and build communication so that it lands in the right context.

The result

As a result, VkusVill received a practical tool for working with the health theme: a structured description of cultural codes and scenarios through which the audience perceives healthy living, and clear reference points that allow the brand to speak to people more precisely—without repeating the market’s generic language or substituting form for meaning. This material helps the team make decisions faster, align communications internally, formulate messages more accurately, and build interaction with the audience so that it sounds natural and recognisable specifically to “their” people.

(Details of the study and specific wording are restricted under NDA.)