Healthy sales

In August 2007, Unlimited magazine published an article on the ethics of marketing to children titled ‘The Young Ones’. In that article I advocated for the regulation of marketing that causes harm, with particular reference to the marketing of high-energy foods to children.

The advertising industry in New Zealand has recently amended its Code for Advertising to Children to, it claims, “ensure that advertising to children will be conducted in a manner that is socially responsible and does not mislead or deceive children”, and introduced a new code called the Children’s Code for Advertising Food.

While I’m pro-regulation of marketing where it is likely to cause harm, the new codes are a commendable step in many respects, particularly the control around using ‘fat free’ claims on products high in sugar (and vice versa) to imply a healthy benefit from what is in reality an unhealthy product. The trouble is, the codes do not apply to packaging and other promotional activities (that is, they’re advertising-specific) and they will not actually prevent the advertising of high-energy foods to children. If it’s good enough to prevent advertising tobacco and alcohol to children, then I believe the same should apply to marketing energy-rich foods.

Put simply, any marketing that causes harm should be regarded as predatory and as a problem that society needs to solve collectively. As professional marketers, we should be looking for ways to change the predatory commercial culture with which we surround and exploit the underprivileged, minors and their families.

The obvious flip-side opportunity for society, however, is to use the marketing industry’s skills and resources to try and reverse some of the damaging consumption behaviours that can ravage communities and destroy lives. While there’s been a recent flurry of well-intentioned social marketing activity by various government agencies around the world, its true value is often questionable.

Like generic marketing, social marketing offers a logical planning process involving consumer-oriented research, marketing analysis, market segmentation, objective setting and the identification of strategies and tactics. But, as others have observed, a key point of difference is that social marketing is based on the voluntary exchange of costs and benefits between two or more parties. It is also more difficult than generic marketing because it involves changing intractable behaviours, in complex economic, social and political climates typically with very limited resources. Furthermore, for generic marketing the ultimate goal is usually to meet shareholder objectives; for most social marketing campaigns the goal is to improve people’s quality of life. This is a much more challenging goal than those for more traditional marketing programmes.

So, given the obvious challenges confronting marketers engaged in social marketing, is it actually worth the investment or would resources be better invested elsewhere? What kind of marketing interventions, if any, can actually make a difference?

Let’s consider the increased rate of child obesity within Western society. Because unhealthy eating choices have a significant impact on weight gain, not knowing how to help children make healthy eating choices is an obvious and important gap in knowledge. Recent research by Raju, Rajagopal and Gilbridge published in the Journal of Marketing may however provide some insight into how marketers can help society bridge that gap.

In a large-scale field study the authors looked at the effectiveness of incentives, published (within class) pledges and competitions as a means of increasing healthy choices by young children (US grades three to eight) selecting foods for their school lunches.

Here’s a summary of their conclusions:

1. It is critical to focus on younger children, as they’re more likely to change their behaviours in response to interventions.

2. Not all interventions work equally well across all age groups. Pledges were less effective with younger children, whereas for older children all three interventions improved the choice of fruits and vegetables, although competitions worked better than pledges and incentives for the older participants.

3. Teacher involvement was important; authority figures make a difference by increasing understanding of the intervention and the ease of following instructions, especially with younger children.

4. Multiple sources of influence (teachers, local newspapers and radio stations, peer pressure and so on) might help improve outcomes, especially in a large school setting where individual attention might not be possible.

5. Continual reminders are likely to be important as the researchers noted a drop-off in choice over the trial as the weeks progressed. This is particularly evident in the case of children making pledges.

6. School lunches may be an effective and sustainable, and relatively easy context in which eating interventions can be implemented school-wide (particularly in countries where school-provided lunches are the norm).

7. Enhance school lunch menus to increase availability of fruits and vegetables.

8. Use relatively long interventions (that is, for longer than a month) to yield sustained changes in eating behaviours.

So there’s the opportunity for marketers of healthy food choices. While it may not always be possible in New Zealand to team with educators and help realign the food preferences of children in schools (because most New Zealand schools do not provide lunches for their students), there are surely opportunities for incentives, pledges and competitions within some schools, social media and other channels.

Any marketers working on those kinds of positive-change projects would certainly feel happier going home at the end of the day to look their children in the eye.


John Varcoe is a father of two teenagers and an Auckland-based director of Everything Everythingdesign.co.nz