Robert P. Hamlin

The impact of front-of-pack nutrition labels on consumer product evaluation and choice: an experimental study

OBJECTIVE The present research was an experimental test that aimed to quantify the impact of two dominant front-of-pack (FOP) nutritional label formats on consumer evaluations of food products that carried them. The two FOP label types tested were the traffic light label and the Percentage Daily Intake. DESIGN A 4×5 partially replicated Latin square design was used that allowed the impact of the FOP labels to be isolated from the effects of the product and the consumers who were performing the evaluations. SETTING The experiment was conducted on campus at the University of Otago, New Zealand. SUBJECTS The participants were 250 university students selected at random who met qualifying criteria of independent living and regular purchase of the products used in the research. They were not aware of the purpose of the research. RESULTS The presence of FOP labels led to significant and positive changes in consumer purchase intentions towards the products that carried them. These changes were not affected by the nature of FOP labels used, their size or the product nutritional status (good/bad) that they were reporting. CONCLUSIONS The result is consistent with the participants paying attention to the FOP label and then using it as an adimensional cue indicating product desirability. As such, it represents a complete functional failure of both of these FOP label types in this specific instance. This result supports calls for further research on the performance of these FOP labels before any move to compulsory deployment is made.

Does the Australasian "Health Star Rating" Front of Pack Nutritional Label System Work?

This article describes an experiment to measure the impact of the Australasian “Health Star Rating” front of pack nutritional label system on consumer choice behaviour. This system presents a one-half to five star rating of nutritional quality via the front facings of food product packages. While this system has been recently rolled out across Australasia, no test of its impact on food choice has been conducted. A sample of 1200 consumers was recruited on exit from supermarkets in New Zealand. A 2 × 2 factorial design was used with two levels of cold cereal product nutritional status (high, five star/low, two star) and two levels of the Health Star Rating label (present/absent). The dependent variable was revealed choice behaviour. The results indicated that the presence of the label had a significant depressive effect on consumer preference, but that this impact was not moderated in any way by the nutritional status expressed by the label. The result represents a significant functional failure of the Health Star Rating label in this research environment. The nature of the failure is consistent with the consumers processing the label in much the same way as the nominal brand cues that dominate the retail food packaging.

The rise and fall of the Latin Square in marketing:a cautionary tale

Purpose – This paper aims to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of experimental design and development in academic marketing since 1950.Design/methodology/approach – The paper does so by taking one experimental design, Latin Square, and describing its history and development within academic marketing in detail.Findings – The Latin Square is a powerful experimental technique that first rose to prominence in agriculture in the 1920s and has remained a key tool in this discipline ever since. The technique was introduced into marketing in 1953, and enjoyed a period of great influence and popularity until 1973, when it abruptly disappeared from the publications of the discipline. Careful investigation of the research record of this period revealed that its demise was due to increasingly poor application method that led to compromised results, combined with an erroneous assignation of superior capabilities to full and fractional factorials that occurred at approximately the same time.Practical implications...

Retailer brand share statistics in four developed economies from 1992 to 2005: Some observations and implications

Purpose – This paper seeks to examine long‐term trends in retailer and manufacturer brand shares in grocery product categories, and to relate these trends to retailer category strategy with regard to these two types of brand.Design/methodology/approach – The study makes use of secondary data and empirical materials from the literature to establish and explain the trends in four countries: the UK, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand. Additionally, interview data are used to develop issues.Findings – The results indicate the existence of long‐term equilibrium points between the shares of manufacturer brands and retailer brands in grocery product categories in the USA, New Zealand and Australia. Only the UK shows strong growth of retailer brands in line with retailer consolidation and power, but this trend is arrested, reversed and brought to equilibrium in 2001.Research limitations/implications – The data presented are restricted to four major English‐speaking economies between 1992 and 2005. The data are a...

Acquiring market flexibility via niche portfolios

Purpose – This paper seeks to establish that the instability of niche markets, and their predisposition to catastrophic collapse, makes market flexibility a prerequisite for long‐term survival among niche marketers. It describes the two ways by which a niche marketer can acquire this market flexibility and demonstrates the advantages of the second of these two approaches, i.e. the development of a portfolio of separated niches.Design/methodology/approach – An in‐depth discussion of niche instability/implosion, and how niche market flexibility can be acquired to increase the survivability of such events, provides the context for a single in‐depth case study of a company employing a systematic niche market flexibility approach. A multi‐method approach was adopted drawing on both interviews and documentary evidence.Findings – Planning for flexibility is essential for long‐term survival as a niche marketer. Two broad approaches to achieve this exist – i.e. contingency and portfolio planning – which are not mu...

Front of Pack Nutrition Labelling, Nutrition, Quality and Consumer Choices

This article reviews recent research on front of pack (FoP) nutritional labelling systems and their relationship to consumer choice. The mechanics of the major FoP label types are described, and recent research that tests the impact of these FoP systems on consumer choice is reviewed. Recent theoretical developments in food consumer choice are then discussed. The implications of these developments for the major FoP label types are then developed. The article concludes that several major types of FoP labels, falling into two major groups, evaluative and reductive, are now fully developed and are being deployed. FoP research that is developmental in nature is thus redundant. There is no possibility that evaluative and reductive types can both be effective. Therefore, there is a critical need for a research that tests these FoP labels and that identifies whether evaluative or reductive labels are compatible with food consumer choice before further deployment occurs.

A systematic procedure for targeting market research

Discusses the targeting and reporting of commercial marketing research. The treatment of this critical stage of the research process is severely underrepresented in the academic marketing literature and in marketing research texts. Six prerequisites for effective targeting and reporting are identified. An extended model of the research process, incorporating the tasks that are essential for targeting and reporting is developed. The model and the six prerequisites are then used as the basis for the development of an operational procedure that allows a targeted set of research hypotheses to be developed from a decision problem, together with a formal record of the logical links between them. The importance of these written links for effective decision support, and the use of these links in the research reporting process, is also discussed.

The consumer testing of food package graphic design

Purpose – This purpose of this paper is to present a technique for measuring the impact of package graphic designs on consumer choice and purchase intentions. The technique allows several proposed graphic designs for the same product to be compared, both with one another and with their immediate competitors up to a maximum of eight designs. Design/methodology/approach – The approach is based upon a fractionally replicated Latin square design with two sets of four package graphic designs and five consumer groups as the independent variables. The dependent variable is consumer choice. Findings – Three fully worked examples of the test are presented. The results show that graphic design has a massive and statistically significant impact on consumer choice, ceteris paribus. The test is able to discriminate strongly between package graphic designs that only apparently differ in detail. Research limitations/implications – The results show that graphic design has a significant impact upon consumer choice, but it...

The Impact of the Australasian ‘Health Star Rating’, Front-of-Pack Nutritional Label, on Consumer Choice: A Longitudinal Study

Front-of-pack (FoP) nutrition labels are a widely deployed tool in public good marketing. This article reports on a field experimental test of the impact of one of these systems, the Australasian Health Star Rating system (HSR), on consumer choice in the breakfast cereals category in New Zealand. This study forms part of a time-series replication stream of research on this topic. The research applied a 2 × 2 factorial design with multiple replications to retail food consumers exiting from supermarkets in New Zealand. The first part of the time series, undertaken shortly after the HSR’s initiation in 2014, indicated that the HSR was ineffective. Between 2014 and 2016, commercial brands in the category within New Zealand massively promoted the HSR as a basis for consumer choice. The research presented in this article forms part of the second part of the series, undertaken in 2016, using an identical experimental methodology to the 2014 study. The results indicate that the HSR may be beginning to influence consumer choice as it was predicted to, but the impact of the system is still small, and statistically sub-significant, relative to other consumer decision inputs presented on the package.

“The Gaze Heuristic:” Biography of an Adaptively Rational Decision Process

This article is a case study that describes the natural and human history of the gaze heuristic. The gaze heuristic is an interception heuristic that utilizes a single input (deviation from a constant angle of approach) repeatedly as a task is performed. Its architecture, advantages, and limitations are described in detail. A history of the gaze heuristic is then presented. In natural history, the gaze heuristic is the only known technique used by predators to intercept prey. In human history the gaze heuristic was discovered accidentally by Royal Air Force (RAF) fighter command just prior to World War II. As it was never discovered by the Luftwaffe, the technique conferred a decisive advantage upon the RAF throughout the war. After the end of the war in America, German technology was combined with the British heuristic to create the Sidewinder AIM9 missile, the most successful autonomous weapon ever built. There are no plans to withdraw it or replace its guiding gaze heuristic. The case study demonstrates that the gaze heuristic is a specific heuristic type that takes a single best input at the best time (take the best2 ). Its use is an adaptively rational response to specific, rapidly evolving decision environments that has allowed those animals/humans/machines who use it to survive, prosper, and multiply relative to those who do not.