Healthy food items with an appealing packaging design could lure children into eating right, according to a new study.
"The food industry has a lot of experience in using marketing effects to increase product sales amongst children," says Dr. Bernd Weber of the University of Bonn. "By comparison, there is very little knowledge about how such marketing effects can be used to better promote healthy food products to children."
Working with 179 boys and girls between the ages of eight and ten, the research team asked them to choose between three snacks that were a mix of yogurt, fruit and cereal.
The only difference between the three snacks was the packaging, which was either plain, plain with health information or jazzed up with cartoon characters and an appealing product name.
Using a handgrip dynamometer, the research team gauged the extent of their subjects' motivation to obtain the popular snack -- unsurprisingly, the one packaged with the appealing name and cartoon characters.
According to data from the handgrip dynamometers, the children made their greatest effort when reaching for the snacks packaged with the endearing cartoons, and that snack even scored best on the taste test despite being identical to the other two.
Merely asking the children which taste they preferred would not have sufficed to explain their choices, according to Dr. Weber, whose study awaits publication in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
"This is a classical marketing placebo effect," he says. "As in the case of a placebo medication, effects ascribed to certain products, which are not justified by the ingredients."
In a like-minded study, researchers from the Cornell Food & Brand Lab in the US concluded that enticing presentations of healthy food by restaurants and grocery stores could actually hook consumers.
Working with 112 studies about healthy eating behaviors, the researchers concluded that convenience, appeal and the idea that making healthy food choices is just the normal thing to do are three conditions that convert junk food lovers.
In a cafeteria, for example, diners were more likely to add a banana to their tray before paying than they were to ask for a serving of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream that was buried in the freezer, according to the study.
That study was published in the journal of Psychology and Marketing.
