CVS voluntarily walked away from an estimated $2 billion in annual tobacco revenue in 2014 and rebranded as CVS Health, turning a business decision into one of the most-covered healthcare PR stories of the decade. Theranos built a multi-billion-dollar valuation on marketing alone, before its claims were exposed as fraud and its founder was convicted. Seven healthcare and wellness campaigns show how this category builds consumer trust, and how fast it can collapse without it.
How Did Digital Health Brands Build Consumer Trust?
1. Noom's psychology-based weight-loss positioning. Noom built its marketing around behavioral psychology rather than calorie counting alone, positioning itself as fundamentally different from traditional diet apps. Heavy podcast advertising across hundreds of shows turned the brand into one of the most recognizable names in digital health in a short span, built on a message of mindset change rather than a specific diet plan.
2. Hims & Hers' destigmatizing telehealth marketing. Hims & Hers built its brand on approachable, non-clinical language and design for conditions like hair loss and erectile dysfunction that consumers had historically found embarrassing to discuss. The destigmatizing tone, paired with a direct-to-consumer telehealth model, helped the company go public via a SPAC merger in January 2021.
How Did Legacy Healthcare Brands Make News With a Single Decision?
3. CVS Health's tobacco exit, 2014. CVS announced in February 2014 that it would stop selling cigarettes and tobacco products in all its stores by October of that year, a decision the company itself estimated would cost roughly $2 billion in annual revenue, and rebranded from CVS Caremark to CVS Health to reflect the shift. The decision generated sustained, overwhelmingly positive earned media coverage that a traditional ad campaign of any size could not have purchased.
4. GoodRx's price-transparency positioning. GoodRx built its entire brand around showing consumers the real, often wildly different, prices pharmacies charge for the same prescription, a direct challenge to an industry not known for pricing transparency. The positioning carried the company to a public listing in September 2020 built almost entirely on consumer trust earned through transparency rather than traditional brand advertising.
How Did a Drug and a DNA Test Become Cultural Phenomena?
5. Novo Nordisk's Ozempic and Wegovy cultural wave, 2022-present. Novo Nordisk's diabetes and weight-management medications became a sustained cultural and media phenomenon starting in 2022, driven by widespread public conversation rather than a traditional direct-to-consumer campaign. The attention briefly helped make Novo Nordisk Europe's most valuable public company, an unusual case of a pharmaceutical brand becoming a mainstream cultural topic largely through earned conversation.
6. 23andMe's personal-discovery marketing. 23andMe built its consumer genetic-testing brand on the appeal of personal ancestry and health discovery, marketing that helped the company go public via a SPAC merger in June 2021. The brand's later struggles, including a 2023 data breach and a 2024 bankruptcy filing, show how a consumer-trust brand built on personal data can unravel just as quickly once that trust is broken.
The Cautionary Tale: Theranos, 2014-2022
Theranos built one of the most covered healthcare brands in Silicon Valley history on marketing and personal charisma, with no working product underneath it. Founder Elizabeth Holmes built a cult-of-personality press narrative around a claimed revolutionary blood-testing technology, reaching a peak valuation investors put at roughly $9 billion on magazine covers and founder profiles rather than peer-reviewed results. Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou's 2015 investigation began exposing that the technology did not work as claimed, and Holmes was convicted on fraud charges in January 2022 and sentenced to more than 11 years in prison later that year. Theranos remains the clearest case in healthcare of a PR-built brand that outran the product it was supposed to represent.
What Patterns Repeat Across These Campaigns?
1. A single values-based decision can generate more trust than years of advertising. CVS's tobacco exit and GoodRx's price transparency both worked because the brand gave up something real rather than just saying the right words.
2. Destigmatizing language is itself a growth strategy in health categories. Noom and Hims & Hers both built entire brands around making an uncomfortable topic easier to talk about.
3. Cultural phenomena can outrun a brand's own marketing budget. Novo Nordisk's Ozempic attention happened largely through public conversation, not a campaign the company purchased.
4. A healthcare brand's trust is only as strong as its weakest real claim. Theranos's marketing-first approach and 23andMe's data breach both show that a health brand's story eventually has to match what's actually true underneath it.
How Is AI Search Changing Healthcare PR?
A growing share of U.S. adults now ask AI chatbots health-related questions before or instead of a search engine, a pattern 5W's own Health Insurance AI Visibility Index 2026 tracks across insurers and health plans. A healthcare brand's public record, its regulatory history, its substantiated claims, its data-handling track record, is increasingly the raw material an AI engine cites when a consumer asks which brand to trust, making that record as important as traditional media relations. See 5W's GEO and AI search services for how that measurement turns into a program.
What This Means for a Healthcare Brand's Next Campaign
5W is a healthcare and wellness PR firm building media credibility and AI-search visibility for health, diet, and digital health brands, with client experience including GNC. The difference between the brands on this list that built lasting trust and the one that remains a cautionary tale was rarely the sophistication of the marketing. It was whether the brand's claims could survive the scrutiny that eventually comes to every healthcare brand that gets big enough to attract it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Happened to Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes?
Theranos built a peak valuation investors put at roughly $9 billion on claims about revolutionary blood-testing technology that did not work as advertised. A 2015 Wall Street Journal investigation began exposing the gap between the marketing and the product, and founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of fraud in January 2022 and sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.
Why Did CVS Stop Selling Tobacco Products?
CVS announced in February 2014 that it would stop selling cigarettes and tobacco products in all stores by October of that year, a decision the company estimated would cost roughly $2 billion in annual revenue, and rebranded as CVS Health to reflect the shift toward a healthcare-focused identity.
How Did GoodRx Build Its Brand Around Price Transparency?
GoodRx built its brand by showing consumers the often wildly different prices pharmacies charge for the same prescription, a direct challenge to pricing opacity in the pharmacy industry. The transparency-first positioning carried the company to a public listing in September 2020.
What Happened to 23andMe After Its Data Breach?
23andMe, which built its brand on personal ancestry and health-discovery marketing, disclosed a data breach in 2023 affecting millions of users and filed for bankruptcy in 2024, showing how quickly a consumer-trust brand built on personal data can unravel once that trust is broken.
How Is AI Search Changing Healthcare Brand Choice?
A growing share of U.S. adults now ask AI chatbots health-related questions before or instead of a search engine, making a brand's regulatory history, substantiated claims, and data-handling record part of what an AI engine cites when a consumer asks which brand to trust.
