Harmful Marketing: An Overlooked Social Determinant of Health

Abstract

This paper reviews evidence about the impact of marketing on ill health. We summarize evidence that marketing practices in six industries (tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical, processed food, firearm, and fossil fuel) are causal influences on the occurrence of injury, disease, and premature death. For each industry, we provide a brief overview on the extent of harmful marketing, efforts from each industry to obscure or otherwise conceal the impact of their marketing strategies, and efforts to counter the impact of harmful marketing in these industries. However, considering the ubiquitous belief that regulation is harmful to society, little headway has been made in reducing harmful marketing. We propose the substitution of a public health framework for the currently dominant free market ideology. Doing so would situate harmful marketing as a social determinant of health and consolidate the disparate efforts to regulate marketing of harmful products. Implications for future policy and research efforts are discussed.

Keywords: Alcohol; Cigarettes; Commercial determinants of health; Firearms; Fossil fuels; Guns; Harmful marketing; Opioids; Pharmaceuticals; Processed food; Tobacco.