Who checks the message?
Health marketing exists as a distinct practice. In 1971, Zaltman and Vertinsky proposed that marketing concepts could be applied to health outcomes, improving how people access care and make decisions about their wellbeing. The idea sat within social marketing, alongside cultural and public health communication. Cultural institutions practise marketing to improve accessibility, broaden participation, and enrich the experience of a wider public. Public health campaigns practise it to change behaviour at population level. Health marketing, under that same premise, was about connecting people to services that could help them, through communication designed with the audience’s benefit in mind. In its simplest form, health marketing is the application of marketing principles to health services and outcomes, with the goal of connecting people to care through accurate, accessible communication.
That premise matters because the field has moved. Private clinics, wellness providers, longevity services, and independent practitioners now market through websites, online profiles, advertising, and content using the same channels available to any commercial business. This shift is legitimate. Advertising in healthcare can help people find what they are looking for and reach providers they can trust (Kim and KC, 2018). The commercial application serves a real function. Still, it remains an open question whether the practice honours that starting point, or whether the tools have outpaced the ethics. Inside health institutions, adopting marketing has always involved negotiating between commercial logic and care logic. When the commercial side operates with no counterweight of care, the communication drifts.
What separates health marketing from commercial marketing is the audience’s condition at the moment of contact. Schenker, Arnold and London (2014) framed this precisely. Health consumers make decisions under vulnerability, shaped by fear about a diagnosis, hope for a treatment, and uncertainty about whom to trust. In that state, a claim on a website, a description of a procedure, or an answer to a frequently asked question carries weight that a commercial message does not. Each one shapes a decision that affects a person’s body. The communicator carries a responsibility proportional to the audience’s inability to independently verify the claim. The question that runs through this article is simple. Who checked that claim before it reached the person it was written for?
Readability as an ethical standard
In commercial marketing, readability means clarity, while in health it requires something more. Can someone tell whether a statement is backed by evidence or shaped by aspiration? Would they be able to distinguish a regulated provider from an unregulated one? Can they identify whether what they are reading was reviewed by a qualified professional or produced with no such oversight?
Across most health-related material in Greece today, these distinctions are invisible. A clinic’s website reads the same regardless of whether its claims hold up under scrutiny. An online profile presents the same visual confidence whether the provider is licensed for a procedure or not. Long-term loyalty in health is driven by trust and service quality, yet the output layer rarely reflects this.
Achieving readability means working against the way health branding currently operates. Anker, Sandøe and Kamin (2011) documented how health marketing creates beliefs through implied rather than stated claims. A medical-sounding name, a premium neighbourhood, interior design that signals authority, staff photographed in clean corridors. None of these are explicit claims. Together they construct perceived credibility that operates below conscious evaluation. Making health material genuinely readable means producing material where the explicit layer, the actual words and descriptions, does the work honestly enough that the person reading it can assess trustworthiness on its own terms. Reaching this goal requires recognising that health branding often works precisely because it is unreadable, and choosing a different approach.
How the message reaches people
People in Greece find health services through three overlapping layers, each with a different relationship to accuracy.
Word-of-mouth remains the primary trust mechanism. A friend recommends a doctor. A family member shares their experience. This is personal, grounded in someone’s physical encounter with a service, and carries weight that no campaign can replicate. The marketing partner’s role here is indirect but consequential. If the communication created expectations that the experience could not meet, the conversation that follows will reflect the gap. The message precedes the recommendation, even when no one involved saw the ad.
Digital content is where marketing responsibility becomes most direct. The website, the online profile, the Google listing, blog articles, procedure descriptions, testimonials. Each is a statement that persists, gets indexed, and shapes decisions long after it was written. Ethical concerns arise when patient imagery appears online lacking adequate consent or context (van der Boon et al., 2024). But the problem extends beyond privacy. A procedure page that omits risks carries clinical implications. Likewise, a testimonial that implies unqualified outcomes carries clinical weight. Who reviewed these before they went live?
AI is the emerging layer. A 2025 survey of 2,000 Greeks found that 51% of those using AI tools consult them for health topics (Onmed, 2025). 61% search for information about symptoms. 34% seek medical advice. 16% use AI to find a provider. When someone asks ChatGPT about a condition, the response is assembled from whatever material exists online, including website copy that was never submitted to professional review.
The limitation requires honest framing. Consumer AI tools process text. For symptoms that require visual or physical examination, a text-based response operates at maximum distance from assessment. For example, a person who describes a skin condition in words receives probability matching shaped by language alone. Visual AI tools are improving, but even these work from images that lack the context of physical examination, patient history, or clinical environment. A photograph is not a consultation. The gap between what AI can process and what assessment requires remains fundamental in most areas, even as it narrows in some.
What is published online becomes source material for AI responses generated months or years later. Inaccurate material does not stay in one place. It enters the information ecosystem permanently. What a marketing partner puts in is what people will eventually get back.
The gradient from medical to lifestyle
Health marketing is better understood as a spectrum than a single category.
At one end sit core medical services: diagnosis, treatment, surgery, management of chronic conditions. These operate under professional regulation, peer accountability, and supporting data. The messaging around them is constrained by professional standards.
At the other end sit lifestyle wellness offerings with minimal contact with the body, such as yoga retreats, meditation programmes, or nutrition workshops. These carry low risk. The marketing around them requires honesty but operates under different pressures.
Between these poles, a category has grown rapidly. Anti-aging protocols, regenerative therapies, intravenous drips marketed as optimisation, longevity procedures, and cosmetic interventions positioned as wellness. These involve physical procedures, carry real risk, and borrow the vocabulary of medicine freely. Words like “regenerative,” “stem cell,” “bio,” and “protocol” each imply a scientific basis that may or may not exist for the specific application. The servicescape reinforces this (Bitner, 1992). A clean interior, professional photography, a prestigious address. The accumulated effect constructs medical credibility that no one outside the profession can independently verify.
The verification obligation scales along this gradient. A yoga retreat website needs honest descriptions. A clinic promoting intravenous procedures needs qualified review of any description that touches the body. The principle is consistent. The application varies by proximity to physical risk. A marketing partner working across this gradient needs to calibrate, and calibration requires understanding where the risk actually sits.
Why this matters more in Greece
Greece’s healthcare system places an unusual amount of navigational responsibility on the individual. Primary care gatekeeping is limited. Out-of-pocket spending sits around 34% of total health expenditure, more than double the EU average. People frequently self-refer to private clinics with no professional intermediary guiding the decision. The personal doctor scheme is still developing as a genuine gatekeeper. European data protection frameworks, designed primarily for commercial contexts, have not kept pace with how health communication operates across digital platforms. A substantial private sector fills gaps the public system cannot, but the person moving through it often has no way to distinguish a regulated provider from one operating outside the framework.
In this environment, the marketing layer becomes structural. People rely on websites and online profiles to navigate because the system itself does not guide them adequately. As a result, the quality of the digital presence becomes the de facto quality signal.
Recognisable scenarios sit within this gap. A clinic offering services under wellness branding that it was not authorised to perform. A website describing a procedure while omitting that the supporting data was thin. An online post using before-and-after imagery that lacked context, risk disclosure, or consent. A person who searched for a provider through AI, where the response drew from the provider’s own unverified output. Each is a moment where a marketing claim shaped a health decision with no one checking whether the claim was accurate.
This pattern appears wherever the communication layer carries more trust than the oversight behind it. Transport safety. Food labelling. Sectors where what is communicated shapes decisions with physical consequences.
Discipline, not positioning
There is a difference between targeting health professionals as clients and practising health marketing as a discipline. The first is a positioning decision. The second is a structural commitment that shows up in the process. Structured processes improve outcomes in how care is delivered and in how it is communicated. The same principle applies to marketing.
Practising it demands familiarity with the regulatory context in which providers operate, the ability to recognise when a brief asks for language that moves faster than the evidence, and a commitment to building content where someone can distinguish what is evidence-based from what is aspirational. This is an editorial and ethical practice embedded in production.
When we work with health professionals and organisations, we require a medical advisor assigned by the client to verify that what is published in the campaign, the website, and across platforms is accurate toward the person it addresses. The level of scrutiny scales with the level of physical risk, but the process is present throughout.
Bélisle-Pipon (2021) proposed that marketing professionals working in health should carry ethical obligations comparable to the professionals they serve. We agree. In practice, this means the advisor, the content review, the willingness to rewrite when a statement does not match the evidence, and the understanding that what goes online today enters an environment that people and AI models will draw from for years.
Health marketing serves a real function. It connects people to services, builds trust, and helps providers reach those who need them. What it produces can affect a body and redirect a life. Whether they acknowledge it or not, any marketing professional or agency working with health services providers carries this weight. What matters is whether the process reflects it.
If you are a health professional or organisation looking for a marketing partner, this is the conversation we believe should come first.