Blog 4

Written on 2:39 PM by Sarah

For the individual topic report, I’d like to explore the trend of increasing health consciousness in consumers and as a result, the greater number of consumer goods companies marketing food products with health benefits.

It’s hard to think of a consumer goods category that hasn’t succumbed to this fad. Most consumer goods giants have acquired or created an organic product line (ie. General Mills owns Cascadian Farm and Muir Glen, Kellogg owns MorningStar Farms, and Kraft owns Boca Foods). Even Vicks cold medicine has been running commercials promoting its “new” Vicks plus Vitamin C. Everything from antioxidants to whole grains, no preservatives to all natural and organic, are fair game for consumer goods companies and for the most part, this marketing strategy seems to be working.

In my paper, I plan to explore the mechanics behind and the reasons for the success of this marketing campaign from a consumer behavior/customer insights perspective and possibly predict future directions for this category.

This topic is interesting to me for two main reasons. First, I am fairly health conscious, and I believe that I belong to the target market for most of these products (and purchase a decent amount of them). Since I am a consumer in this category, I think my findings would be especially interesting since they would apply on a personal level. Second, ever since I declared Marketing as my major, I’ve been interested in a career in Consumer Products/Goods, especially from a brand management and segmentation standpoint. Cereal and yogurt may seem boring to other marketing majors, but I’ve always been fascinated by the different marketing and branding strategies behind two otherwise identical products.

At this point, there are a few connections to customer insights or customer experiences that are apparent to me. The first is how consumer goods companies create value for their customers, specifically through their health conscious products. On the surface is the obvious benefit of better health, but what about the more subtle benefits? I think it would be interesting to explore what better health really means to consumers. Second is the kinds of experiences that customers are looking for. What do customers want from a “healthy” food product? What kinds of commercials and advertisements are most effective? These are the kinds of questions that would fall under this topic. And the final connection is the extent to which consumer goods companies influence consumer beliefs about what is healthy. For example, the Corn Refiners Association has recently launched a publicity campaign in an attempt to convince the public that high fructose corn syrup is no more harmful that sugar (see video below). This campaign is no doubt in response to the truckloads of food products that advertise “no high fructose corn syrup”, which suggests that high fructose corn syrup is an undesirable ingredient.




I’ve found several articles that are relevant to this topic, including many academic articles. One of these academic articles comes from the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing and is titled “Health Claims in Food Marketing: Evidence on Knowledge and Behavior in the Cereal Market”. The article abstract is quoted below:

This study examines the ready-to-eat cereal market during a period in which producers were initially prohibited from advertising cereals' health benefits but were later permitted to make health claims. Results indicate that producer health claims led to significant increases in consumer knowledge of the fiber-cancer relationship, in fiber cereal consumption and in product innovation. Government and general information sources had limited impact on fiber cereal choices in the years prior to the advertising, despite the accumulation of scientific evidence linking fiber to colon cancer. Most segments of the population increased their fiber cereal consumption once health claims were added to the market, but some informationally disadvantaged segments that had responded less to government and other sources of information responded disproportionately to health claims compared to other segments. These findings suggest that policies governing producers' use of health claims should be evaluated not only on how well they control deceptive or misleading claims, but also on how well they encourage producers to disseminate evolving health information to consumer.

Ippolito, P. M., & Mathios, A. D. (1991). Health Claims in Food Marketing: Evidence on Knowledge and Behavior in the Cereal Market. Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, 10(1), 15-32.

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