Food companies spend more than 1 billion dollars a year marketing to childrenand highly processed foods they now make up the majority of children’s diets. Foods high in sugar and fat are often much cheaper than healthier options, especially in developing countries.
These forces have led to public health impacts around the world. In the United States, one in six children is obeseand the number of overweight children she has tripled in some developing countries over the past three decades.
Michal Maimaranprofessor of marketing at Kellogg, has spent much of her career asking how, despite the onslaught of external forces that make healthy eating so difficult, kids can still make better food decisions. As a research professor of marketing at Kellogg, she has studied the factors that influence children’s decision-making—both at home and at school.
Now, he’s discovered a new approach to getting kids to choose healthy foods.
In a series of experiments, she and her colleagues, Szu-chi Huang of Stanford University and Daniella Kupor of Boston University, show that creating the right kind of product promotion can encourage children to make healthy food choices on their own. Maimaran and her team found that this promotion increased sales of a healthy food option during a price promotion and maintained higher sales after the promotion ended.
“We found a tangible approach that could be used on a larger scale to help kids make healthier food choices,” he said.
Testing different products and messages
In many parts of the world, foods high in fat and sugar they are much cheaper rather than healthier options.
Previous research looking at offering price discounts to children to offset this challenge has typically studied older children and used additional tools in addition to discountingmaking it difficult to isolate just the effect of discounting.
Maimaran and her colleagues wanted to overcome these obstacles. And, in collaboration with UNICEF, they identified three elementary schools in Panama where they could test their ideas. Panama was an ideal location in part because developing countries are underrepresented in the healthy eating literature, but also because of the prevalence of kiosks in schools.
Students in Panama, even young children, often carry money and make independent purchases of food and beverages at school kiosks, which offer both healthy and junk food options. This scenario allowed the researchers to track the students’ purchases at an individual level, while knowing that these purchases are made by the children themselves without the intervention of adults.
The team asked: Would providing children with discount coupons to redeem on healthy items at the kiosk incentivize healthy choices in this population?
There was some doubt about whether young children could be affected by the coupons. The students in these schools were between the ages of 6 and 11. Some research shows that consumers under the age of 9 do not understand the value of money and that Children often do not consider price when shopping. But other research has found that children like age 5 can distinguish between spending and saving.
There was also the question of how to word the coupons. The team used two different types of messages. A direct message would simply state the final (discounted) price of the item, while a derivative message would require some mental calculation (eg subtract $2 from the original price).
This difference is key, as 6-7 year olds think more concretely and tend to rely on an observable dimension, such as size or shape, when making decisions. But around age eight, children can think more abstractly and can use more complex information-processing strategies, and previous research shows that when consumers are required to process more information, they can actually increase the persuasive impact of that information.
Finally, the researchers wanted to understand what would happen to healthy food purchases both if the promotion was repeated and after the promotion ended.
Promoting healthy choices in Panama
The research team tested these ideas in three elementary schools in Panama, where, like the United States, children often eat foods high in calories and poor in nutrients. For example, 52 percent of Panamanian children eat fast food a week and 81 percent drink sugary drinks five or more times a week.
Together with UNICEF, Maimaran and her colleagues interviewed local groups to select a healthy product to promote in each school kiosk. In the first school, that product was a healthy cereal shake that was more expensive than more than two-thirds of the other kiosk options. Before their promotion began, the stand was selling about 24 of these shakes a day.
At the beginning of the experiment, every student in the school got a token for the shake. About half of the students got a coupon that said, “A cereal shake usually costs $1. Tuesday to Thursday only! Pay only 80 cents when you buy your cereal shake!” Other students received a coupon that required some mental math: “A cereal shake usually costs $1. Tuesday to Thursday only! Pay 20 cents less when you buy your cereal shake.” Each voucher had a serial number indicating the student’s grade and class, as well as a unique counting number, so vouchers could not be duplicated. The booth manager collected and tracked the coupons, which only had a three-day redemption period.
Then, three weeks after the first coupons were handed out, the team handed out another round of identical coupons to see how the children would react this time. Previous research has shown that repeatedly improving healthy choices canfuel habit formation and solidify behavior change.
Final decline in sales
At first, the coupons seemed to work. Shake purchases initially rose more than 35 percent. However, after the promotion ended, shake purchases actually fell below their initial base. When a second round of coupons was given, purchases increased again, but only by a small margin over the base price. Then, when the offer ended, purchases fell even further.
“When the promotion ended, it drew attention to the real price of the product,” Maimaran said. “The fact that it was expensive became even more apparent and led to a drop in sales.”
When the researchers analyzed the effect of promotion by age, they found that, initially, the direct message was more effective for younger children, while the derived message that required more effort was more effective for older children.
But when the coupon promotion was repeated, the older children seemed to lose interest in both types of coupons. Redemption rates fell.
In contrast, the younger children who received the derived tokens that required math used more of them this time. The research team hypothesized that repeated exposure to these types of messages eased the children confidence and ability to process a more complex message.
When the team ran a similar experiment promoting a different product at a second school, a healthy fruit drink that was also more expensive than two-thirds of the other items, it had similar results.
An approach to higher sales after promotion
But the team wondered: How could they get kids to keep buying healthy foods even after the promotion ended?
The research team had an idea. At a third school, they conducted another similar study, again with a healthy fruit drink. But this time, the drink was not among the most expensive products sold at the stand. It was only more expensive than 27 percent of the other items.
Again, sales of the drink increased during the promotion—from less than one drink per day all the way to 34 drinks per day—and declined after the redemption period. This time, however, the drop wasn’t quite as low—the stand was still selling about five drinks a day. When they repeated the promotion, they again saw sales rise and fall. Again, the decline was not below the base price. Twelve days after the second offer, the kiosk was still selling more than two of these drinks a day.
The researchers concluded that when the initial price of a healthy product is relatively cheap compared to other options, it can benefit from increased sales after the promotion.
Empowering children to make the right choices
A key point is that relative value matters. So don’t promote healthy foods that are much more expensive than other options. If you want the result to last, choose a product that is relatively affordable.
“It shows that kids are price sensitive,” Maimaran said. “Getting these results really confirmed that the kids really understand what money is and that was very encouraging.”
Maimaran also advises thinking carefully about matching the language of the coupon message to the age of the children receiving those coupons. Keep in mind that when promotions are repeated (as they often are), this will give even younger children time and confidence to process more complex messages.
Ultimately, the goal is to encourage healthy behavior that will stick with children throughout their lives. “Parents won’t always be around,” Maimaran said. “We need to empower children.”
