Special Session: Better Food, Better Life, and Applying Marketing to Achieve Social Change: An Abstract

Abstract

Many populations currently deal with adverse effects of a wide array of cheap, pre-prepared, readily available, nutrient-deficient food products (many containing too much salt and sugar) that are widely promoted to consumers. Food provisioning generates additional areas for societal concern as wastes can be observed all along the food chain. Related to these concerns, marketing practices have been denounced as deceptive. A broad array of practices, including creating and promoting attractive unhealthy food, fostering waste through improper packaging, and/or the promotion of multi-buy packaging are linked to obesity and food waste. This special session is an important reminder that marketing can be used to deliver societal good. Social marketers seek to create, communicate, and deliver innovative solutions to improve the well-being of target audiences (Andreasen 2014). The specific objective of this special session is to outline how marketing theoretical and methodological advancements can be made while achieving social change focusing on food. The first two presentations are focused on the evaluation of program outcomes. Our first presentation directs attention toward expanding understanding of the methods that are used to evaluate campaign success. Sharyn Rundle-Thiele, Jason Pallant, and Patricia David apply the hidden Markov model (HMM) delivering dynamic results to understand behavior states and the underlying factors delivering behavioral change. Next, Ville Lahtinen, Sharyn Rundle-Thiele, and Timo Dietrich employ an experimental design in ten Finnish schools to understand whether a 4P intervention or a 1P intervention delivers more behavior change (increased fruit and vegetable consumption). Our next presentation focuses attention on the target audience taking a transformative consumer perspective. Patricia Gurviez, Madeleine Besson, and David Blumenthal examine whether connected devices can be effective in the promotion of healthy foods for people who have tried to lose weight in the last 5 years. A co-creation, qualitative approach is used to identify the most appealing connected device. In our final presentation, Lucie Sirieix and Margot Dyen question the potential synergies or contradictions between healthy food and food waste in a daily routine. Their qualitative research focuses on food practices and experiences. Marketing science can deliver change for the better benefitting not only the individuals targeted for change but also the wider society through cost savings and improved environmental and health outcomes. By delivering a series of social marketing studies, this special session aims to challenge more members of the academy to direct research attention to help some of society’s most complex problems.