In the age of digital medicine, it’s easy to believe we’re at the brink of a healthcare revolution. Apps can monitor your heart rate, AI chatbots can listen to your anxieties at 2 a.m., and virtual visits promise to eliminate the dreaded waiting room. For entrepreneurs and investors, digital health is a gold rush. For patients, it’s often something else entirely—a confusing, commercialized, and sometimes deeply disappointing experience.
One of the biggest obstacles digital health companies face isn’t technology, regulation, or even cost. It’s trust. And more often than not, the loss of trust is not due to what these companies can’t do—it’s a direct result of what they choose to do, particularly when it comes to how they digital health companies use marketing to market themselves.
Consider how these services are presented: “24/7 access to care,” “personalized health support,” “mental wellness in your pocket.” The promises are grand, the branding is sleek, and the ads evoke empathy and empowerment. But behind the curtains, the story often unravels. Patients who believed they were accessing care find out later they’ve been sold a product—or worse, sold as a product.
Some of the most popular mental health apps on the market today lure users in with carefully crafted marketing campaigns. Their messaging speaks directly to people in distress, using emotionally charged language and the visual shorthand of support—gentle colors, affirming words, testimonials. It all feels safe. But dig deeper and you find a landscape where user data isn’t just collected for “service optimization,” but often shared or sold for advertising purposes.
The issue here isn’t just one of corporate overreach. It’s a moral failing. Health marketing—particularly in the digital age—needs to start from a very different premise than traditional tech promotion. A healthcompany is not a fitness brand. It’s not an entertainment app. When someone downloads a mental healthtool or a symptom checker, they are doing so from a place of vulnerability. That vulnerability demands a different standard of ethics, communication, and transparency.
Unfortunately, the current marketing playbook for digital health often borrows from Silicon Valley instead of medical ethics. Terms like “disruption” and “user growth” dominate strategy meetings, while patientoutcomes take a backseat. This misalignment has led to a steady stream of broken promises: apps that claim to treat depression without clinical backing, chatbots that simulate therapy but fail to escalate care when someone reports suicidal thoughts, telehealth platforms that offer convenience but are staffed by underqualified clinicians operating with scripts.
The failures aren’t just operational—they’re communicative. Overpromising is a marketing sin that becomes a public health hazard when applied to healthcare. If a consumer product disappoints, you lose customers. If a health product misleads, you can lose lives.
And then there’s tone. Too many digital health brands seem to forget the emotional context of their users. Campaigns that frame mental illness as a quirky personality trait or “just another biohack” don’t resonate with people managing chronic anxiety or suicidal ideation. Likewise, glossy influencer campaigns for hormonal health supplements often trivialize serious conditions like PCOS or endometriosis. When you frame healthcare as a lifestyle accessory, you alienate the very people who need your service most.
Tone-deaf messaging is more than just bad PR—it’s damaging. Every trivializing ad contributes to thegrowing skepticism people feel toward digital care. When your product appears less as a tool and more like a toy, it tells patients they aren’t being taken seriously.
But some of the most catastrophic failures in digital health marketing come from the companies who start with genuinely good intentions—and then cut corners to scale. Take, for example, platforms that boast AI triage systems. The marketing materials show flowcharts and glowing reviews, but rarely mention how these algorithms are trained, who oversees them, or how often they’re tested for bias or accuracy. Thelack of detail isn’t just suspicious—it’s reckless. If your product relies on AI to assess symptoms, but you can’t tell patients how decisions are made, you’re not just marketing software. You’re marketing a black box that can decide whether someone seeks emergency care or not.
One might think regulation would curb some of this, but digital health still occupies a grey zone in many jurisdictions. Many apps don’t fall under HIPAA regulations. Others avoid FDA scrutiny by framing themselves as wellness tools rather than medical devices. This allows companies to market themselves as health solutions while shirking the responsibilities that come with that title.
Yet regulation isn’t the only answer. Some of the most pressing failures are cultural and strategic, not just legal. A company can follow the law to the letter and still violate the trust of its users. What’s needed is a recalibration of values—one that puts people before metrics, clarity before growth, and outcomes before optics.
That recalibration starts with marketing. Companies must stop viewing promotion as separate from product. How you market your platform is a reflection of how you value your users. Transparency shouldn’t be hidden in footnotes or legalese. Risks, limitations, and privacy practices should be front and center. If your product has a margin of error or is only intended for certain use cases, say so. Not in tiny text—right in the headline.
Marketing should also include lived experience. Too often, campaign strategies are written in boardrooms and ad agencies, far from the reality of the people they aim to serve. Include patients in your creative process. Talk to therapists, clinicians, and health advocates—not just growth strategists.
Finally, companies need to own their mistakes. When a tool fails, when privacy is compromised, whenusers are misled—own it. Issue statements, not spin. Fix the problem, not just the optics. The trust that digital health companies so desperately seek can’t be manufactured. It must be earned, protected, and—when lost—humbly rebuilt.
Digital health is still young. The industry is still shaping its identity. But if it wants to become a legitimate pillar of healthcare, its leaders need to treat digital health marketing not as decoration, but as a core pillar of patient experience. This is no longer about ads—it’s about ethics. The companies that understand that difference will not only survive—but lead.
