Liudmila Tarabashkina

The effects of television and Internet food advertising on parents and children

OBJECTIVE The current study examined the impact of television and Internet food advertising on Australian parents and children. DESIGN Parents and their children aged 8 to 14 years were exposed to a television advertisement, an Internet advertisement or a control picture for four commonly advertised energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods. SETTING Online web panel survey, Australia. SUBJECTS Parents (n 1302) and their children aged 8 to 14 years (n 1302). RESULTS After a single exposure to each advertisement, parent respondents in the two exposure conditions evaluated the products more favourably, had a greater desire to consume the products and thought the product could be consumed more frequently than those in the control condition. Similar trends were observed among children, although the differences were statistically significant only for the frequency of food consumption in the Internet advertisement condition and the evaluation of one product. CONCLUSIONS The results have implications for assumptions of adults’ immunity to advertising. This is of particular importance in efforts to address child obesity and the reliance on parents to mediate the effects of food advertising.

Food advertising, children's food choices and obesity: interplay of cognitive defences and product evaluation: an experimental study.

Objectives:To investigate the role of product evaluations, nutritional and persuasion knowledge on children’s food choices conducted because of limited evidence about the role of product evaluations on consumer choices in conjunction with cognitive defences.Design:A randomised controlled 2 × 2 factorial experiment with an exposure to a food and a control (toy) advertisement conducted in a non-laboratory setting at an annual event traditionally visited by families.Subjects:Children aged 7–13 years with biometric/weight data representative of the general Australian population.Measurements:Height and weight (converted into body mass index z-scores) measured in addition to children’s nutritional and persuasion knowledge, product evaluations, age and gender.Results:The factors that undermine children’s cognitive defences relate to taste, social appeal of foods and low nutritional and persuasion knowledge. An interplay between the above-mentioned factors was also observed, identifying four groups among young consumers, alluding to a complex and at times impulsive nature of children’s decisions: (1) knowledgeable children with less positive product evaluations choosing a healthy snack; (2) knowledgeable but hedonism-oriented children seeking peer conformity choosing an advertised product; (3) knowledgeable children who chose a snack belonging to the same product category; and (4) less knowledgeable children with positive product evaluations and low nutritional knowledge choosing snacks from the advertised product category. Obese children were more likely to belong to a cluster of less knowledgeable and hedonism-oriented children.Conclusions:The problem of consumption of less healthy foods is complex and multiple factors need to be considered by health practitioners, social marketers and parents to address the issue of childhood obesity. Nutritional knowledge alone is not sufficient to ensure children make healthier food choices and emphasis should also be placed on persuasion knowledge education, targeting of peer norms, self-efficacy and stricter regulation of advertising aimed at children.

Children and energy-dense foods – parents, peers, acceptability or advertising?

Purpose Studies to date have focused on one or very few factors, rather than exploring a host of influences associated with children’s consumption of energy-dense foods. This is surprising as multiple agents are relevant to children’s food consumer socialisation (parents, peers, social norms and food advertising). This study aims to address these gaps and offers the first comprehensive empirical assessment of a wide cluster of variables. Design/methodology/approach A cross-sectional study was undertaken with children aged 7-13 years and their parents/main carers, collecting family metrics from parents and data directly from children. Structural Equation Modelling was used to estimate a series of interdependence relationships in four steps, revealing the increased explained variance in children’s consumption of energy-dense foods. Findings The inclusion of multiple potential factors increased the percentage of explained variance in children’s consumption of energy-dense foods. The models explicate which factors relate to frequent consumption in children, and clarify various indirect influences on children through parents. Originality/value For the first time, a wider range of variables was integrated to maximise the percentage of explained variance in children’s behaviour, providing policy makers and social marketers with novel insights regarding areas that need to be prioritised for consumer education. Both direct and indirect relationships were assessed. Data were collected from parents and their children to provide an original methodological contribution and richer data for investigation.

When persuasive intent and product’s healthiness make a difference for young consumers

Purpose This study aims to fill in the above-mentioned gap by looking at both children’s understanding of advertising and product cues during decision-making. Currently, it is assumed that understanding of advertisements’ persuasive intent represents the sole factor that children consider during decision-making, which overlooks the role of intrinsic product cues (taste or healthiness) and more complex interaction between the latter and the perceived persuasive intent. Design/methodology/approach An experiment with children (of ages 7-13 years) and a survey of their parents were carried out. Findings When exposed to an advertisement, children exhibited less favorable food preferences when they grasped the advertisement’s intended persuasive intent and evaluated the product as less healthy. Participants who did not believe that the advertisement aimed to influence them and rated the product as healthy, exhibited more favorable intention to consume the advertised snack. Research limitations/implications This study shows that persuasive intent and healthiness product cues are used simultaneously by young consumers and need to be considered in future research to provide more in-depth understanding of children’s decision-making. Originality/value The findings highlight the importance of previously overlooked intrinsic product cues and the need to consider both persuasive intent and product cue evaluations to better understand why children may exhibit less healthy food choices.

Family fun: a vital ingredient of early adolescents having a good life

ABSTRACT Comprehension of the factors which promote young people’s well-being is important, particularly during adolescence. This article investigates how family and school factors affect life satisfaction as an indicator of well-being. It examines a representative sample of 5440 Australian students in Years 4, 6, and 8, who completed a child-centred survey as part of the Australian Child Wellbeing Project. Classification tree analyses are used to show that high life satisfaction is associated with family cohesion (families have fun together), and with schools, if they are places that are free from bullying, where students like to go, and where teachers believe in their success. These findings will interest policy makers and practitioners aimed at improving the well-being of adolescents by promoting the importance of family cohesion, and by supporting schools to implement anti-bullying policies which use a variety of instructional methods based on high expectations.

Contemporary Young Consumers and Food Consumption—Implications for Social Marketing Research

Marketing has undergone profound changes during the past 30 years with a shift from television advertising to digital marketing and development of more engaging campaigns between brands and individuals. This change has also affected young consumers (i.e. children aged less than 13 years), who attracted marketers’ attention in the mid-1980s, who have ever since been marketing aggressively to this group across multiple media channels, engaging in the so-called “cradle-to-grave” marketing. Research shows that exposure to food advertising is associated with biased product evaluations extending into adulthood and the last two decades have also noted a substantial increase in the rates of childhood obesity and overweight levels worldwide. Although research about young consumers and their food consumption started more than 40 years ago, current discussion centres predominantly around the impact of food advertising on children and extant knowledge remains fragmented and inconclusive in relation to a number of external, as well as internal influences. In particular, it is still unclear how children choose healthy and less healthy foods under the influence of different socialisation agents and their own consumer knowledge about advertising or nutrition. Extant gaps impede effective policy development and successful social marketing campaigns since the full extent of children’s susceptibility to food advertising remains unclear. This paper was inspired by work conducted under PhD candidature supervision by Prof. Pascale Quester and provides a review of social marketing literature to highlight the gaps in our knowledge and delineate important directions for future social marketing research in relation to young consumers’ food consumption.