• by Les Luchter , October 10, 2023

Last week, Marketing Dailycovered how Therabody is redefining workouts to encompass everyday activities. This week, health tech brand Oura, whose smart ring tracks sleep and physical activity. is out to “rebrand stress.”

Stress has been “positioned as all negative,” Oura’s chief marketing officer Doug Sweeny tells Marketing Daily, but “those times in your life when you are under stress can be the most creative and most productive times.”

While stress can impact your overall health “to a degree,” Sweeny says, “resilience and how you recover from that stress is what’s really important.”

Oura on Tuesday debuts a new feature  called “Daytime Stress” that, every 15 minutes, identifies stress triggers by continuously measuring small changes in biometrics like heart rate and body temperature.

The brand also plans to add a feature called “Stress Resilience” this winter. It will assess users’ ability to withstand physiological stress by tracking stress load and recovery, both in the daytime and during sleep.

Supporting the new stress features, Oura has launched an ad campaign on over-the-top TV, linear, digital, social, Spotify and podcasts. There’s also digital out-of-home in New York City. Miami and Boston. Oura handles both creative and media planning in-house.

In one :30 spot, a man is shown waking up with a smile while a voiceover asks, “When’s the last time you felt good, like really good?” Then, as the man walks down the street while his steps are counted, and then rests in a park, the narrator says, “Oura Ring helps you get enough sleep, and enough steps. It also helps you manage your stress, so you can see what your body really needs."

Oura cites American Psychological Association statistics that 77% of people experience chronic stress affecting their overall health -- in such areas as anxiety and depression, high blood pressure and cardiovascular health.

So Damar Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills player who suffered cardiac arrest on the field last season, has come on board recently as an Oura brand ambassador. “He’s out talking about how Oura has impacted his life and his wellness,” says Sweeney.

Besides “Daytime Stress” and “Stress Resilience, Oura has announced the Beta launch of “Reflections,” a journaling feature that enables users to record their mood and mental state though voice and gestures.

“People don’t tend to wear their smartwatches in bed,” he says. “They charge them on their end table. That’s not the way people wear Oura. It’s the most intimate product. You can wear it in the shower.”

Oura has also announced partnerships with mental health platform Headspace and behavior change technology company Thrive Global.

Coinciding with the launch of Stress Resilience, Oura users will be able to access such Headspace content as meditations and guided breathwork.

Thrive, meanwhile, will launch a series of sleep and stress management challenges on its platform, with the option for their users to integrate sleep and stress data from Oura.

Oura rings sell for $299 and up. The company says it has sold some 1 million of them over the past 10 years, mainly to help people sleep better. All rings give the user three scores -- sleep, readiness for activity and activity levels  -- while $5.99/month memberships provide additional info like in-depth sleep analysis and heart rate monitoring.

Oura rings are sold both D2C and at Best Buy stores. Only Oura sells the memberships.