Q: What was the timeline for the study? A: It was about six months. It started in May and ended in October. It was a total of four stores and we started data collection at two of the stores first, had about a month or so of overlap time and then concluded with the second two stores. The primary reason for that was because of possible issues of seasonality because it could be that people drink differently in the summer than they do when it’s a little bit colder outside, so we adjusted for all of that in the models but purposefully staggered the data collection periods.
Q: And the results were quantitative, mainly? You were really
just gauging what sold after people encountered the signage?
A: Exactly. Our denominator was all purchases and we were looking at the percentage of sugar-sweetened beverage purchases.
Q: Was the researcher taking note of whether the customer looked at the signs?
A: We qualitatively talked about this. Weekly, we’d check in and he’d tell me about the signs. … [The research assistant] certainly said that adolescents noticed the signs, but again, we purposefully didn’t stop them and say, ‘Did you notice the sign and did it affect your purchasing behavior?’ We simply observed the purchase. But we have been funded to do this study again and in that, we will both be doing focus groups on the front end to ask adolescents—this time including Hispanic adolescents, too—‘What sorts of things are most effective? Is it a physical activity equivalent? Is it the number of teaspoons of sugar in a can of soda?’ Then on the back end, we’ll do exit interviews among a sample of adolescents and ask them, ‘Did you see the signs and how did it affect your behavior?’
Q: Are you also going to test whether this kind of signage or messaging would work on a label versus on a sign?
A: I think, logistically, that would be very hard because that would require a partnership with Coca-Cola or some other bottling company and I would imagine that they would be somewhat hesitant to allow us to do that. I mean, if they would, I would love to, but I think that would be somewhat tough. But it’s something that would be interesting to try. Another thing that we will look at in the follow-up study is we’ve [already] observed: Signs are posted and what’s the immediate effect on purchasing behaviors when it comes to sugary beverages? But there could be some post-intervention effects, such that the signs come down and for three to six to nine months out, people are still being affected by what they saw previously, and we’ll also test that post-intervention effect in the follow-up study.
Q: If we’re going to extrapolate on these findings and guess at
what kind of lasting consumer behavioral changes might take place, what do you think such signage would do? Do you think that this will increase consumers’ food literacy and nutritional literacy so that they might reconsider imbibing so many sugary beverages a day? What are you hoping that this kind of educational tool will result in?
A: My sense is that this sort of information is not necessarily educating the consumer, but really it’s making information more interpretable. Right now, anything that you buy that’s packaged has calories on it—cookies have 200 calories, a bag of chips has 300 calories—but if you don’t have a good sense of, a.) how many calories you should have in a given day and, b.) what the tradeoff is in terms of how much exercise you have to do to burn that off, I don’t think people realize how much they’re consuming.
What I hope this type of information will do is it will cause people to pause and say: ‘I’m going to have to run for an hour and a half to burn off a bag of chips? Maybe I’ll just forego the bag of chips. Maybe I’ll get something that’s lower-calorie instead.’ By increasing the transparency around the, sort of, tradeoff between consumption and expenditure, I think it would make it easier for people to make more educated decisions about their consumption.
Q: How about from a marketplace perspective, though? Are
you hoping, ultimately, that marketers will start to change their labels to be exercise-related rather than calorie-focused, or are you hoping that this will inspire more of a public service announcement approach across the industry in which this kind of educational messaging will be pumped out?
A: I think both would be wonderful. A challenge that we have in private industry is that the way that nutrition information is reported varies quite a bit by product line and by the type of item that it is. The way you see things on a can of Coke may be different than you see things on a box of sugary cereal. … One thing that would need to happen that’s going to be really important is that assuming that we were able to provide calorie information in the form of a physical activity equivalent, it would have to be something that’s standardized across the different products because if you see minutes of running in one place, minutes of yoga somewhere else and minutes of basketball in a third place, my guess is that it may lose its meaning with consumers. But if it’s the same message consistently, I think that could actually have an effect. We have to figure out, what kind of physical activity is most meaningful when it comes to changing behavior? My guess, from the literature and from this study, is that it’s probably something that’s more on the negative side because if you pick something that people enjoy doing, they’re going to say, ‘Oh, well, I’ll go dancing for an hour and burn off that piece of pizza.’ But if they have to run or do sit-ups or push-ups, it’s not really as desirable. I guess that’s the first thing. The second is that there’s obviously logistical concerns. If you’re putting on a can of soda ‘150 or 250 calories,’ that takes up a certain amount of space. If you then want to try to say, ‘This is the equivalent of 50 minutes of jogging,’ that’d take up a lot more space, so I think you have to figure out the best way to present this information. And if you standardized it across all of the different product lines, I think that would allow you to condense it even more because people would be used to seeing that information presented in a certain way. But I would say that, in the case of chain restaurants, the information has to be posted by the middle of this year per federal legislation, so from a public health perspective, how can we maximize something that, from a legislative perspective, is going to happen? I think that what this study tells me is that simply using calorie counts is probably not the most effective way to alter behavior.
Q: Based on studies like yours that show that exercise-related messaging could be effective, do you think that the federal government is going to step in and mandate that that sort of language be used on labels or would it be an industry-led initiative?
A: I would be surprised if there were legislation largely because I think the industry could make the argument, which is compelling, that the information is already there and it’s already required to be there. You turn this package over and it says how many calories per serving are in something. There’s been a lot of industry-led initiatives when it comes to anti-obesity, anti-calorie things over the past four or five years and I think a lot of that seems to be an effort to, sort of, make sure that the heavy hand of government doesn’t come down or to stay ahead of it.
march 15, 2012 | marketing news
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