They are learning.
They are exploring.
They are trying to understand what is wrong and what might help.
At this stage, they are not asking which brand to buy.
They are trying to connect the dots and understand what is actually causing their symptoms and what genuinely works before they buy anything.
Reaching this audience requires a completely different approach than typical product ads or standard funnels.
Most agencies do not even recognise this Blue Ocean audience as a market segment.
So they skip it entirely and focus only on Red Ocean buyers, missing the biggest trust and belief building window in the entire journey.
In the Blue Ocean, competition is low, ad costs are lower, and customers are far more willing to listen, learn, and trust the first brand that helps them understand their problem.
Once you understand these two audiences, everything about your marketing and growth strategy shifts.
You stop fighting over the same small pool of buyers in the Red Ocean, where everyone competes at the most expensive and unstable point of the journey.
And you begin reaching a much larger group of Blue Ocean customers earlier, when they are open, curious, and forming beliefs.
So the real problem is not that you are not trying hard enough.
It is not that your ads are bad.
And it is not that you are missing some secret tactic.
The real problem is that your brand has been competing at the wrong stage of the supplement-buying journey.
Your ads have been unknowingly pushed by the ad platform AI into the most crowded, expensive, and lowest leverage part of the market.
You are playing the hardest game in the supplement industry while ignoring the easier, more profitable path that exists earlier in the journey.
This is the invisible trap that keeps even high-quality supplement brands stuck, even when they are doing almost everything right.