Small food establishments can rely on innovative advertising strategies to create their own loyal customer bases and stimulate word-of-mouth advertising. Advertising allows small businesses in the food industry to make a name for themselves, alerting consumers to the availability of new options on the market. Marketing is a priority for the success of any company, from independent small-scale farms to multinational food manufacturers. Food marketing takes many forms and can involve establishing relationships with customers, increasing brand awareness, developing new products, promoting them through advertising, and even paying grocery stores for outstanding shelf space, all with the aim of promoting sales.
For better or worse, food marketing can have a powerful effect on what people eat and, ultimately, on their health. Food and beverage manufacturers focus most of their marketing efforts on promoting the sale of soft drinks, breakfast cereals, candies, snacks and other nutrient-poor products. 2,3 In environments designed to encourage the purchase of these products, willpower and knowledge how to eat healthy, while important, are often not enough to prevent people from adopting eating behaviors that increase the risk of diet-related diseases, 1.4 Marketing is a tool that can be used in a way that promotes or harms health. An advertising campaign about broccoli, for example, successfully increased sales of broccoli and improved consumers' perceptions of broccoli as a tasty and healthy food, 7 Why then the U.S.
UU. Are food marketing budgets being used overwhelmingly to promote the sale of nutrient-poor products, such as soft drinks and sweetened breakfast cereals? Adding value increases profits for food manufacturers. Unfortunately, some of the most processed and nutrient-poor products generate the most profits. This is partly because they are often made with raw materials, such as grains, which cost little to the manufacturer and are versatile enough to be processed into many different high-value products that satisfy consumer preferences for salt, sugar, fat and comfort.
Many fruits and vegetables, on the other hand, are simply frozen, canned, peeled, sliced, pre-washed, or sold raw, meaning that they have less potential to add value.4 While food manufacturers are finding new and more cost-effective ways to market fruits and vegetables11, broccoli has not yet caught the attention of chocolate-glazed cereals. For every successful new product, there have been countless failures, including Life Savers, Pepsi A, M soft drinks. The cola for breakfast, the frozen main courses of the Colgate brand (the toothpaste company) and the snacks made with Olestra, a fat substitute that can have a laxative effect. Since space on store shelves is limited, only the most successful products remain; the rest is removed from stores.
With such fierce competition between new products, a successful marketing campaign can make the difference between a global sensation and a financial disaster.4 This is one of the reasons why advertising and other forms of marketing so often promote the “next big thing”, even when there is little or no significant difference between these “new products” and their predecessors. Marketing aimed at young children raises ethical issues. Most children under the age of 8 cannot understand from a developmental point of view that the purpose of advertisements is to persuade people to buy products. 21 staff members of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a government organization responsible for protecting consumers, stated in 1981 that it is unfair and misleading to advertise aimed at children under 6 years22, but a ban was never implemented.
23 people rely on food labels to tell them what a product contains, its nutritional value and how it was produced. For example, shoppers may look for products labeled “organic,” trans-fat-free, or “antibiotic-free,” or they may want to learn about animal welfare standards or fair labor practices. Using labels to convey these qualities is an important part of marketing a product. Some food labels meet strict federal guidelines.
The nutrition information panel, for example, has been mandatory since 1994 and is strictly regulated by the U.S. The Department of Agriculture, for its part, requires a certification process for its USDA organic label (although organic standards have been the subject of frequent debate). The following list of suggested resources is intended as a starting point for further exploration and is by no means exhaustive. Some materials may not reflect the views of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.
Center for a Livable FutureJohns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health 111 Market Place, Suite 840 Baltimore, MD 21202. You have your product and you know the best way to sell it and what price to charge. Now you'll have to increase consumers' knowledge about your product and convince potential customers to buy it. The creation of advertisements in local newspapers or commercials for radio and television are traditional ways in which companies promote their products. Unfortunately, these media are not suitable for most emerging food companies, as they are expensive and advertised to everyone instead of focusing on their target market.
Word-of-mouth advertising is an alternative when your goal is to retain a target group instead of saturating a larger market. That's because a satisfied customer often has like-minded friends who can be persuaded to try your product. This increases sales slowly, which creates a greater number of followers for your new product and will eventually generate demand in grocery stores and independent local farmers markets. A second important public health implication of the market power of dominant processed food manufacturers is that it increases their capacity to directly shape retail food environments, in some cases through the use of anti-competitive practices, such as exclusive bargaining agreements and the setting of tariffs.
A proposed approach to systematically identify and monitor the corporate political activity of the food industry with respect to public health using publicly available information. In addition, this document could serve as a model for future public health research in order to systematically review the market strategies used by companies in other food sectors (such as retail and food service), as well as by companies in other sectors harmful to health. Creating new brands in the food sector is not always easy, considering the significant quantity of these products that are produced in the agricultural sector and in small food industries. We rely on the NOVA food classification system to support the rationale for focusing on dominant processed food companies (see Fig.
Supermarket food products (“private label”) are those manufactured by a third-party food manufacturer or by contract and sold on behalf of a retailer. Another key obstacle to market entry in many processed food markets is the fact that dominant food companies have managed to establish economies of scale in terms of production, marketing and financing. The review identified several cases in which it was demonstrated that dominant food companies had exploited information asymmetries about consumers in relation to food labeling, composition and production processes. To understand the ways in which companies in the food industry act to maximize profits and power, it is essential that the public health community has the tools to monitor and analyze the full range of strategies used.
Third, the market power of dominant processed food manufacturers over small-scale producers can promote and bolster the production of unhealthy processed food products, especially in cases where the product portfolios of the dominant manufacturers are mainly comprised of unhealthy food products. In many food industries around the world, the processed food manufacturing sector is highly oligopolistic in terms of market structure (i). Consumers are concerned about the health impacts of food consumption and are therefore sensitive to statements related to food safety. .
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