A new research on the yoga market from 1980 to the present has shown how meanings and practice of yoga changed as it was adapted by the US market.
Chapman University's results show that yoga became decreasingly associated with spirituality and increasingly associated with medicine and fitness, arguing that the shift in the meanings are due to the changes in how yoga gurus are trained, market contests amongst different meanings and the distinct branding practices of small and big players in the market.
The study is timely as today, 20.4 million Americans practice yoga, up from 4.3 million in 2001. They spend 10.3 billion dollars a year on yoga classes and products, including equipment, vacations and media; constituting an increase of 80 percent in just four years. The U.S. yoga market density has been increasing with yoga enterprises rising from 14,058 to 26,506 and the number of employers increasing from 58,525 to 112,890 during the 2004--2013 period.
Co-author Gokcen Coskuner-Balli said that they discovered that the U.S. yoga market delineated itself not only in the different types of yoga that emerged, but also in the logic behind why people do yoga, adding that as multiple meanings and rule systems or "logics" co-exist in the marketplace, how to manage the demands from multiple constituents is a challenging task.
Coskuner-Balli added that numerous logics exist in many fields including healthcare, finance, and education, to name a few. In the paper, they develop a managerial framework for managing conflicting demands that might exist amongst logics and conveying brand legitimacy.
The market drivers behind yoga are spirituality, medical, and fitness. Sources trace the beginning of yoga in the United States to Swami Vivekananda's speech representing Hinduism at the first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. During the first half of the 20th century, yoga was construed mainly as a spiritual practice linked to mysticism, magic, and asceticism with religiophilosophical underpinnings and an emphasis on Raja yoga (the mental science) rather than Hatha yoga (physical yoga).
The study is published in the Journal of Marketing.
