Powered by healthism? Marketing discourses of food and health

Abstract

Purpose Driven by the visible proliferation of marketing scholarship dedicated to the topics of food marketing and consumer well-being, this study aims to examine the prevailing meanings and assumptions around food and health in marketing research. Design/methodology/approach Following the guiding principles of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge and the methodological orientation of critical discourse analysis, the authors analyze a systematically produced corpus of 190 academic articles from 56 publication outlets. Findings The study identifies three discourses of health and food dominant in marketing and consumer research. Each of the three discourses blends the ideology of healthism with market(ing) ideologies and provides a unique perspective on the meanings of health and health risks, the principles of appropriate consumer conduct and the role of marketing in regard to consumer and societal well-being. Research limitations/implications The study contributes to research into ideologies in and of marketing by introducing useful concepts that help explain the role of healthism in marketing discourse. Practical implications The finding of three dominant discourses could help reduce at least some of the existing complexity in regard to conflicting knowledge existing in the domain of health and food, and thus could inspire a more reflective body of work by researchers, policymakers and marketers towards improved food-related well-being. Originality/value This analysis of assumptions and consequences of the meanings mobilized by the dominant marketing discourses contributes to a better understanding of the current state of knowledge about health in the market reality.

The effect of front‐of‐package nutrition labels on the choice of low sugar products

“…In a world where obesity is considered among the main causes of illness (World Health Organization, 2017), front-of-package (FOP) nutrition information has become a priority. Previous research has established the conceptual connection between the idea of being healthy and various ideologies of marketing (Silchenko & Askegaard, 2020a). This reinforces the fact that healthiness is an important aspect discussed in the marketing field, but also that marketing can play an important role in affecting healthy behavior of people (Silchenko & Askegaard, 2020a, 2020bSilchenko et al, 2020).…”

Towards co-created food well-being: culinary consumption, braggart word-of-mouth and the role of participative co-design, service provider support and C2C interactions

“…Despite the increasing economic and socio-cultural significance of culinary leisure experiences, their design has received scant attention across both marketing (Zampollo and Peacock, 2016) and food well-being literature (Scott and Vallen, 2019). Yet, to create meaningful and engaging experiences, service providers must adopt a holistic, collaborative and innovative approach to co-creating and co-designing these participative activities with customers, cognizant of the implications of co-created experiences on consumers’ food well-being (Silchenko and Askegaard, 2020; Voola et al , 2018).…”

Facemask: from pandemic to marketplace iconicity

“…Once more, the market transformed specialist scientific knowledge into consumeristic "enchantment" (Rose 2014), implying that consumers suspend their disbelief and buy in companies' capacity of providing them with quasi-magical solutions to problems exceeding their understanding or control. While the process of re-semanticisation of technology and science by the market transcends the pandemic context, we note that during the Covid-19 emergency companies' entrance into formerly specialised production systems was legitimised by the urgency as much as by marketing and market ideologies (Silchenko and Askegaard 2020). First, the recently popular belief that companies should overcome market interest in order to act as citizensthe umbrella concept of corporate social responsibility (Maignan and Ferrell 2004)provided non-specialised producers with an ideological justification to share responsibility with other public health institutions in addressing the crisis.…”

“…As most countries embraced community masks in line with a precautionary principle (Jingnan 2020;Sugrue et al 2020) believing that wearing cloth masks is instrumental for community protection, non-specialist newcomers in facemasks production appeared to occupy and exploit such market gap (and are here to stay). In all of these cases, scientific evidence on facemasks (or what is presented as such) has become integrated into a system of market(ing) communication (Silchenko and Askegaard 2020) turning the expert wisdom into "a commodifiable media product" (Coveney 2006) rather than a universal "truth. "…”