Marketing Nutrition

Presentation Topics - Download the program brochure

1. Marketing Nutrition is NOT the same as marketing any other attribute of a product! Food is a much different venue than the more rational contexts of toothpaste shopping and car shopping. Everyone is an expert with foods – we all know what we like. Convincing someone, e.g. to eat soy because it may help reduce weight will be unsuccessful if the consumer either sees the product as a magic pill or if they see it as something they have to tolerate- as a medicine. We will learn how to handle these problems.

2. Do consumers believe their eyes or their stomachs? Research shows that there are a number of environmental factors that trick consumers into overeating. Further, there are eating “scripts” which become automatic patterns and cause consumers to unknowingly eat. Understanding these scripts and acquiring this knowledge can help companies to develop a win-win situation with the consumers.

3. Effective targeting of consumer groups – A good deal of the disconnection between nutrition education and behaviour change is due to ineffective targeting. Some people will more easily comply with nutrition-related suggestions than others. The well-known strategy of segmenting and targeting consumers can also be applied to segment different tastes. Techniques to identify those will be handled.

4. How can consumers be targeted using feedback profiles and mental maps? How can we profile the ideal consumer? Use this to learn how and why consumers act the way they do. When trying to encourage people to eat a particular food, valuable insights can be gained by understanding why frequent consumers of the food like it so much. Identifying the mental maps can learn us how we can convert infrequent consumers into more frequent consumers. The feedback concepts of laddering and mental maps will be explained to show how they can help marketers profile the perfect consumer, target nutritional gatekeepers, and understand and revitalize brand equity.

5. How to develop labelling that works – Different types of information influence different types of consumers. How can such information be communicated in a way that generates the most impact? Health and diet labels can improve the perceived taste of foods. The length of a front-label claim influences the nutritional beliefs and evaluation of a product when used in combination with complete back-label information. To best leverage labels and nutritional claims, we focus specifically on how claims and labels can be made more compelling. To best leverage labels and nutritional claims, we will focus specifically on how claims and labels can be made more compelling.

6. Labels and Taste –Taste is subjective. People perceive they taste what they think they will taste. It is important not to negatively bias expectations prior to taste. When labelling a menu item it may be more effective to describe the flavour or the type of product than the ingredient. With appropriate segment of consumers ingredient labelling will have favourable consequences. We will see which descriptions are better for which target groups, what pitfalls to avoid.