Transparency and Accuracy of Digital Marketing Communication in a Controversial and Expanding Industry

The growing concern over health and nutrition have led to the proliferation in the consumption of supplements worldwide. In Europe, the market size has reached 13,300 million euros in 2021. Nevertheless, consumers remain uninformed and deceived by products that presume to be remedies for even the most serious diseases. This work aims to evaluate the transparency of supplements enterprises’ corporate communication, exploring the accuracy of the information they provide to the consumer. A quantitative approach was applied, based on the content analysis of corporate websites marketing of vitamin complexes, food supplements, and weight management supplements. The corpus of analysis includes 103 enterprises and encompasses the entire universe of companies that invested in digital advertising between the years 2017 and 2021. Results show that ingredients are absent in more than half of the corpus, compliance with regulation is only explicit in 6 cases, and empirical evidence is omitted in 83.5% of enterprises.