The Marketing of Empowerment and the Construction of the Health Consumer: A Critique of Health Promotion

Abstract

Health promotion claims to be empowering. However, this claim is not without major problematic contradictions and inconsistencies. The way in which health promotion is also controlling is identified in this article. To understand why the discourse of health promotion is traversed by this empowering/controlling contradiction, the discourse is critically analyzed, revealing a parallel with the structure of the discourse of marketing. Health promotion, rather than fulfilling its promise of empowerment, effectively constructs the individual subject as a “health consumer” in accordance with the model of consumer capitalism.