Preventing Childhood Obesity - Evidence Policy and Practice.pdf

CHAPTER 15
Food and b everage m arketing to c hildren
Gerard Hastings and Georgina Cairns
Institute for Social Marketing, University of Stirling and the Open University, Stirling, UK
Summary and recommendations
for practice
• Marketing has a powerful influence on all our
behaviors.
It comprises consumer orientation, multi-faceted
working and strategic planning.
When harnessed to energy dense foods it has contributed
to the obesity pandemic.
It can also be a force for good in the form of social
marketing.
• Experience from tobacco control suggests how this
potential can be realized.
• The ultimate need is to significantly reduce the
commercial marketing for food and beverages to
children and to strategically increase the social marketing
approaches to tackle childhood obesity.
Introduction
Marketing is based on a very simple idea: putting the
consumer — rather than production — at the heart of
the business process. This simple but powerful concept
underpins the effects marketing has had in encouraging
childhood obesity; this chapter argues that, not
only does this obesogenic marketing need to be
reduced, but that the concepts as applied through
social marketing can also guide efforts to combat
childhood obesity.
Consumer focus is only part of the marketing story.
Successful marketing begins with a critical analysis of
Preventing Childhood Obesity. Edited by
E. Waters, B.A. Swinburn, J.C. Seidell and R. Uauy.
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing.
the broad environmental factors that encourage individualized
choices. The resulting insights guide the
development of micro - level offers. Applying a marketing
approach to the challenge of childhood obesity
generates opportunities to make health - reinforcing
behaviors desirable and accessible, and inform multi -
sectoral, multi - disciplinary policy progress. To harness
the power of marketing, however, its potential scope
and force must first be recognized by the broad stakeholder
community, and a marketing mindset applied
from the beginning of the planning process.
This chapter begins by explaining the need for marketing
thinking. It examines the evidence base on food
promotion to children, which has not only established
that there is an effect, but has also informed UK policy
- makers in their decision to impose restrictions on
unhealthy food marketing to children. This path has
been well trodden by tobacco control, and the chapter
goes on to identify significant learning points that
emerge from this experience. Finally, drawing on
tobacco control, commercial marketing and social
marketing experiences, the chapter concludes with
calls to reduce obesogenic marketing to children and
to take social marketing - oriented strategic action. The
necessary behavior changes to reverse the rising rates
of childhood overweight and obesity will not be
achieved by ad hoc, isolated interventions driven by
the supply side (be that public policy or commercial
interests). Comprehensive, large - scale interventions
require strategic planning. Effective planning needs to
be informed and shaped by the recognition that we
are caught in both the firm grip of an obesogenic
environment and a somewhat passive acceptance of
the trend towards overweight and obesity as the norm,
rather than the exception, by many lay persons, and
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