From Tobacco to Tech: What Consumer Marketing Teaches About Digital Health Adoption

When I tell people I spent eleven years in tobacco marketing before moving into digital health, I get one of two reactions.

The first is ethical discomfort. “How do you reconcile those two careers?” (Fair question. I’ll come back to it.)

The second is a kind of professional dismissiveness. “Those industries must be completely different.” And that reaction is wrong in ways that are costing the digital health sector real money.

The consumer behaviour mechanics that drive adoption, retention, and category creation are surprisingly consistent across categories that look nothing alike on the surface. I’ve now applied them in tobacco, consumer electronics, insurtech, and health technology. The specific executions look different. The underlying patterns are remarkably stable.

Here’s what tobacco marketing — specifically the category creation work behind harm-reduction products — actually teaches about building health technology that people use.

On Category Creation: You’re Always Fighting Non-Consumption

When Philip Morris launched IQOS in Italy, the competitor wasn’t other heat-not-burn products. It was the combustible cigarette. Consumers weren’t choosing between options in a new category — they were making a decision about whether to change their behaviour at all.

This is exactly the situation that digital health companies face. When you’re marketing a wellness app, a digital therapeutics platform, or a health monitoring service, your primary competitor isn’t another app. It’s doing nothing. It’s the existing behaviour — ignoring preventive health, seeing a doctor only when sick, managing chronic conditions through habit rather than through technology.

The marketing lesson is fundamental: you must make the status quo uncomfortable before you can make your product attractive. The sequence matters.

In IQOS marketing, this meant making consumers viscerally aware of what combustion actually does before introducing an alternative. In digital health, this means making your audience genuinely feel the health risk, the cost, the limitation of their current approach — before you introduce your solution.

Most health tech marketing skips this step entirely. Companies lead with product features and hope consumers will connect the dots back to their own health situation. They rarely do.

You must make the status quo uncomfortable before you can make your product attractive. The sequence matters.

On Behaviour Change: The Habit Stack Is Everything

The single most important thing I learned in eleven years of consumer goods marketing is this: people don’t adopt new products. They adopt new habits. The product either fits into an existing habit or it doesn’t survive.

Tobacco products work — in the narrow behavioural sense of being habitually used — because they attach to existing habit loops. The after-meal cigarette. The morning coffee ritual. The work break. These are deeply grooved behavioural patterns, and any substitute product has to accommodate the same patterns, not ask consumers to build new ones.

Digital health products catastrophically misunderstand this. They ask users to build entirely new habits — open the app every morning, log your food, complete your daily check-in — rather than attaching to existing behaviours. Then they’re surprised when engagement falls off a cliff within weeks.

The most successful digital health interventions I’ve seen in the market attach AI-driven nudges and recommendations to behaviours that users are already doing. Not asking people to add health tracking to their day. Asking them to make their existing day slightly more health-aware.

This is consumer goods thinking applied to digital health. It’s not complicated. It’s just rare.

On Regulation: The Constraint That Builds Brand

Here’s the counterintuitive thing about heavily regulated categories: the constraints build better marketers.

In tobacco marketing, you cannot claim health benefits. You cannot use certain imagery. You cannot target certain demographics. The channels available to you are restricted. The claims you can make are limited. In this environment, you become intensely focused on what you can say and how powerfully you can say it.

This is excellent training for digital health, which is increasingly regulated and for good reason. But I watch digital health companies react to regulatory constraints exactly the way inexperienced FMCG companies react to budget cuts — with paralysis and complaint, rather than creative problem-solving.

The marketers who thrive in regulated health categories are the ones who’ve developed a muscle for working creatively within constraints. They find the genuine value their product delivers and communicate it with such precision and honesty that they don’t need to exaggerate. They build brand on authentic efficacy rather than on marketing theatre.

Health tech companies hiring marketers purely from startup backgrounds often end up with teams that are brilliant at growth hacking but completely untrained in disciplined, regulation-compliant brand building.

On Trust: The Currency You Can’t Borrow

Consumer goods companies spend decades building brand trust. Digital health requires a different and harder kind of trust: users must trust that the product is looking after their health, not just engaging their attention. This is a fundamentally higher bar.

Most digital health companies underestimate this. They approach trust the way tech companies approach trust — as a marketing problem you solve with good copy and a clean interface. They’re wrong.

Health trust is earned through consistent outcomes over time, through radical transparency about what your product can and cannot do, and through demonstrating that your business model is aligned with user health outcomes rather than just user engagement.

The engagement metrics that impress investors — daily active users, session length, notification click rates — have a complicated relationship with actual health outcomes. Users can be highly engaged with a health app that doesn’t improve their health. Users can dramatically improve their health with a product they use infrequently but precisely.

Health trust is earned through consistent outcomes over time — not through good copy and a clean interface.

On the Thing Everyone Wants to Know About

You’re waiting for me to address the ethics of going from tobacco to health tech. Fair enough.

Tobacco kills people. Harm-reduction products reduce (though don’t eliminate) health risk for people who choose to continue using nicotine. Whether marketing harm-reduction products is ethical when you’re still within a tobacco company is a genuine ethical question that I’ve thought about seriously, and that my colleagues in the industry also think about seriously — more than the outside world assumes.

What I’ll say about it in this context is narrower: the professional experience of marketing products with significant ethical complexity makes you a much more careful, much more honest marketer. When you’ve operated in an environment where you have to think hard about what you can claim, what you should claim, and what the real-world health impact of your communications is — you develop habits of intellectual honesty that transfer.

I came to digital health not despite my regulated consumer goods background but partly because of it. The question “what does this product actually do for the person using it?” had been central to my work for over a decade. In health tech, it’s the only question that ultimately matters.