Peddling a semiotics of fear: a critical examination of scare tactics and commercial strategies in public health promotion

Abstract

This study critically examines the ways in which the nationwide Diabetes UK/Tesco public health promotion campaign (2013)(2014) sought to raise awareness of Type 2 diabetes. Conducting a multimodal critical discourse analysis of six campaign images, we identify the presence of fearinducing, stigmatising and commercial strategies, through which the campaign emphasises the dangers of diabetes and advocates personal responsibility for assessing both individual and others' risk of the disease. Specifically, three discursive techniques are deployed in this campaign to achieve these ends: (1) the depiction of grief and amplification of diabetes-related danger, (2) the promotion of diabetes risk and responsibilization of individuals for their health, and (3) the commercial branding and framing of the Diabetes UK/Tesco partnership as providing tools for diabetes prevention and management. Our findings raise concerns about the moral legitimacy of using fear-inducing and commercial strategies in public health campaigns, strategies which do little to address the environmental factors which are associated with increasing rates of the disease.

Fear, family and the placing of emotion: Black women's responses to a breast cancer awareness intervention

“…The need to educate herself and her daughters proved a strong motivating force. However, we concur with other critically-oriented scholars who caution against the deliberate promotion of fear within public health campaigns (Gagnon et al, 2010;Lupton, 2013;Brookes and Harvey, 2015); it should not be, nor was it, the intention of this intervention to promote what Gagnon and colleagues (2010) refer to as a state of permanent (in)security. Yet, if we consider emotion as intensities that flow between individuals and things, then it is possible to move beyond this rather negative problematic.…”

Multimodal strategies of emotional governance: a critical analysis of ‘nudge’ tactics in health policy

“…A discourse of risk is thus a central theme underpinning public health campaigns (Ayo 2012;Brookes and Harvey 2015;Gagnon, Jacob, and Holmes 2010;Kwauk 2012). It has strong ties to the world of medicine and presupposes that risk can be objectively identified and measured.…”

“…The social consequences are all the more concerning where children and/or parents are thus targeted through biopolitical technologies of surveillance (e.g. the UK school weighing programme; market research and population profiling) or self-diagnosis through questionnaires and surveys (Brookes and Harvey 2015;Evans 2006). These processes serve as mechanisms of 'segregation and social hierarchization…guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony' (Foucault 1976).…”

Journal of Applied Communications, 2017, vol. 101, no. 1 Full Issue

“…Visual semiotics has been applied in analyzing individual perceptions on images in the context of political campaigns (Mcilwain, 2007), marketing and consumer research (Mick et al, 2004), public health promotion (Brookes & Harvey 2015), and education (Kim, 2008). Recently, images have become useful in gaining information on what individuals perceive about agriculture.…”