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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
4 4 July 2017
S
EVERAL YEARS ago I lectured in a manage-
ment school in England. One of the classes
I gave was on food marketing. I began the
class by playing a clip from the then famous
documentary, ‘Super Size Me’, where the
protagonist Morgan Spurlock undertakes an extreme
diet of McDonald’s-only food for a month to chart the
consequences on his body and mental health. The clip
I chose is near the beginning of the documentary -
where two American teenagers are about to sue
McDonald’s for their obesity. I freeze-framed the
image of the two teenagers, and turned to the class.
“Where”, I wanted to know, “does personal responsi-
bility end and corporate responsibility begin?”. As you
can imagine, the entire class fell silent. Then one stu
-
dent pointed to the screen, and said, “Do you see those
two girls? They deserve to die”.
My shock only lasted a moment before the other stu
-
dents chimed in with qualifications to the student’s
statement – no, not really that they deserved to die, but
that they were the ones that were ultimately responsible
for their own health! – everyone knows that McDonald’s
is unhealthy food and should be eaten in moderation! –
no one is forcing them to eat junk food! – and so on. I
asked them whether they would react differently had I
presented them with a documentary on the beauty
industry and freeze-framed two anorexic girls who were
suing L’Oréal for their unrepresentative portrayals of
extremely thin women. “No!” was the incredulous reac-
tion. In such a scenario, there would be more justification
for blaming beauty brands, as they stimulate a mental
vulnerability in all women, with some falling victim at a
more extreme level.
The classroom is a microcosm of society - albeit a
pretty rarefied one. These students, I concluded, were
not some extremist bunch whose mental processes were
close to psychotic. In fact, you could probably argue,
their reactions were a base point for most people’s; they
just happened to be unguarded in their response. I sus-
pect in fact most people feel this way. We feel that we
should be able to ingest what we want, as long as it’s
legal, and that the market doesn’t force us to do anything
– certainly not to consume to excess. These two obese
girls are what we would call ‘bad consumers’ - they
haven’t learned the rules of the market properly. Perhaps
they lack information (they don’t know that it’s healthy
to eat at least five pieces of fruit or vegetables a day, for
example). Or perhaps they lack restraint, whether moral
or physiological (as in, their hypothalamus, the part of
the brain that supposedly regulates appetite, isn’t func
-
tioning properly).
And yet, is this the whole picture? The longer I teach
marketing, the more uneasy I am about where this locus
of control lies. We have never been so health-conscious
and at the same time so fat. These two trends, rather
than being opposites, go hand-in-hand. How come? The
first reason I believe lies in what I call the perversity of
marketplace knowledge. Marketplace knowledge refers
to all the information we have about the market – how
much a pint of milk costs, where to buy a lawnmover, how
many calories are in a can of Diet Coke, that washing
machines live longer with Calgon. That is a huge trove of
information that we learn over the years and carry
around in our heads! Thus, it is much better to think of
consumers as learners and marketing as their teacher.
Within this model, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the
more information you had the better decisions you’d be
able to make.
However, recent research would suggest that this is
not the case. In fact, the more involved we are in our
market-place decisions, the more ‘brand literate’ we are,
the more we fall victim to what are known as halo effects.
The consumer researcher Pierre Chandon has shown that
Marketing is Killing Us: food marketing;
Part 1 of a three-part series on the damage
done by marketing to our bodies, our
planet and our economy
‘healthy’ junk
by Norah Campbell
When one aspect of a food is
portrayed as healthy, consumers will
tend to mentally categorise the entire
food as healthy and when one aspect
of a food is portrayed as healthy,
consumers will tend to mentally
categorise the entire food as healthy
THE HEALTH HALO:
OPINION
No sprme, bu how bou sugr?
July 2017 4 5
when one aspect of a food is portrayed as
healthy, consumers will tend to mentally cat-
egorise the entire food as healthy, leading
them to underestimate its calorie content, and
to overconsume it. This phenomenon is known
as the health halo, and it is not ‘marketing illit-
erate’ consumers who fall victim to it, but
precisely those of us who know a little about
nutrition, are health conscious, and can
understand how branding works.
When the so-called health benefits of a food
are foregrounded on packaging and advertis-
ing (organic, gluten-free, high in natural fibre,
sugar-free, low-fat, packed with fruit,
etc.), consumers typically miscal-
culate the product’s calorific
content: gluten-free bread or
organic ice-cream is some
-
how healthier for us. This is
not a conscious mechanism;
in fact, when people are
made aware of it, they tend to
regulate their behaviour.
The problem is of course that the environ
-
ment we live in is obesogenic – we are
surrounded by messages that encourage eating, and
counter-messages are virtually non-existent. Chandon’s
research also revealed that when consumers believe
they are eating healthily they will unconsciously reward
themselves – those who opted for Subway (positioned
as a healthy fast food) over McDonald’s in one particular
instance tended to add a side and a dessert to their
order. In another experiment, by Chandon’s colleague
Alexander Chernev, overweight participants when pre-
sented with ‘light’ M&Ms increased their consumption
by 47%, whereas normal-weight participants only
increased their consumption by 16%. In this ‘negative
calorie illusion’, people who are more attuned to features
of food and drink that supposedly promote health are
likely to consume more. You can be weight-conscious
and opt for diet versions of foods, but you are more likely
to underestimate the calories, consume more and ulti-
mately become heavier.
These mechanisms are typical of the psychological
vulnerabilities that the food marketing system is expert
in. Our weaknesses stem in part from how we think of
food in the first place. Ask anyone to give a defini-
tion of ‘food’, and their answer will likely be
something like ‘a source of fuel or energy
for the body’. This is what I call the engi
-
neer’s perspective of the world - and
most people, when asked to define
food, speak like engineers. But the best
marketers are those who know that
everything we buy has a deeper, emo-
tional motivation behind it.
We are unconsciously looking for what
marketers call ‘benefits sought’. If a marketer
is able to unlock the deeper pleasure-seeking, status-
seeking or identity-building benefit behind an innocuous
purchase, they will develop a better set of cues to acti-
vate that desire.
As strange as it sounds, we don’t buy bread, we buy
sustenance for the soul. We don’t buy lightbulbs, we buy
illumination. Or, in the famous words of the founder and
CEO of Revlon, we don’t buy lipstick, we buy dreams.
We don’t buy
lipstick, we
buy dreams
Food: susennce for he soul
4 6 July 2017
Converting this simple yet elusive idea of benefits
sought to the world of food, we can begin to understand
how food is not fuel, but fashion (goji berries, cupcakes,
nori crisps, craft beer). We use it to compete for status
(someone drinking a San Pellegrino Melograno e Arancia
is saying something different from what someone drink-
ing a Club Orange is saying, and the person who insists
they can tell the difference is only needier to acquire the
benefits sought). We use it to define boundaries between
‘us’ and ‘them’ – for instance the researcher Susan Linn
has shown that many kids’ food brands portray adults
as mean, uncool, incompetent or absent. Food is a psy
-
cho-social comfort blanket, and we are encouraged on a
daily basis to treat ourselves. Unhealthy food has been
allowed to become more convenient, less expensive,
more visible and more attractive than ever before.
As has been widely reported, Ireland’s obesity rate is
the worst in Europe, with projected obesity rates of
37-38% by 2025. What will the psychological, health,
social and financial costs be? In 2012 Ivan Perry of Uni-
versity College Cork, in collaboration with Safefood
Ireland, estimated that the cost of obesity in Ireland,
which includes both the specific direct costs (such as
hospital care) and indirect costs (such as reduced work
productivity) comes to a total of €1.27 billion per annum.
That number is based on obesity rates, health costs and
other factors from 2009 - so what kind of economic and
psychological bill will we be presented with when 2025
comes round?
This is what they call a ‘superwicked’ problem in social
policy. One of the characteristics of a superwicked prob-
lem is that those who are causing the problem are
attempting to solve it. A Healthy Weight for Ireland: the
Irish government’s obesity policy and action plan for
2016-2025 reads as if obesity were a medical problem.
Unfortunately, this is to use the same faulty thinking that
I outlined just now: as if we simply need more education
to finally understand that junk food is bad for us. The
plan is at best desperately naïve and at worst conveni-
ently complicit in food marketing’s power. It refers on
one occasion to the need to develop “a code of practice”
– whatever this means – for food marketing. And guess
what? The ‘food industry’ (which has been a key player
in the consultation process) is in charge of this action.
Letting the food industry have a seat
at the table is like, as someone once
put it, putting Dracula in charge of
the blood bank.
To this end, I propose that we frame the problem as a
war on obesity. Doing this takes seriously the power and
indirect impact of the multi-billion-euro food-marketing
industry. It would radically curtail the industry’s influ-
ence and more honestly acknowledge that the playing
field is not even. It would include five policy
interventions:
1. Plain packaging on all foods which have a certain fat
or sugar threshold
2. A ban on advertising junk food to children
3. A robust sugar tax
4. A massive investment in ‘eating culture’, which would
see free community-level cooking classes, dedicated
cooking advisors (much like the role of the public
health nurse) to visit homes and help change people’s
eating habits, and the mandatory teaching of home
economics within secondary schools
5.
The inauguration of public gyms with subsidised mem-
berships and the full range of training that exists in the
private sector.
Obesity is a market failure – where the regulation of an
industry by market forces has caused a problem that
exceeds the market benefits. Another characteristic of
superwicked problems is that time is running out, as is
the case here. In the next issue of Marketing is Killing
Us, I will look at marketing and climate change, where it
looks like time has already run out.
This article was commissioned for
Village Magazine by Field Day.
Founded in 1980, Field Day is a
publishing and theatre company
dedicated to cultural critique.
A Field Day podcast will be launched
later in 2017.
www.fieldday.ie
We feel that we should be
able to ingest what we want
and that the market doesn’t
force us to do anything. The
obese girls are what we would
call ‘bad consumers’ - they
haven’t learned the rules of
the market properly
OPINION
