Impulse Marketing: How Supermarkets Help Make Us Fat

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“Product Placement” is Just Code for “Junk Food Up Front”

The New England Journal of Medicine is probably one of the three most respected medical publications on earth, along with the AMA Journal and Britain’s Lancet, and given the lofty credentials, you take their editorial positions rather seriously. In the case of one editorial last month, their position was that supermarkets deliberately and calculatingly position unhealthy food items where we will be most susceptible to buying them, even if we don’t particularly want them.

This is known as impulse marketing in the trade, and the two prime examples, as noted by the Journal, are the array of candy and snacks at the checkout lines, and the displays on the ends of the aisles. The researchers who wrote the editorial state that those highly conspicuous aisle-end displays generate 30 percent of supermarket sales, a number which, if true, should make your head swim. That’s because the markets fill those displays with their highest profit-margin items, those with the cheapest ingredients and strongest spur-of-the-moment appeal, which happen to be those fairly oozing sugars and fats and carbohydrates.

The authors believe that by impulse-positioning the most obesity-linked foods, these supermarket “hot spots” contribute to the national fat epidemic, so much so that they propose regulating “the types of foods that can be displayed in prominent end-of-aisle locations and restricting foods associated with chronic diseases to locations that require a deliberate search to find.”

This notion is going absolutely nowhere, of course, short of a major sea change in American priorities, but before we discuss that reality, a few words in support of their idea. They note that a high proportion of supermarket patrons do their shopping under some form of duress: they’re rushed, or worn out, or distracted, or stressed, or just tired of making meaningful decisions. They’re on automatic pilot, and easy marks for emotional marketing. The supermarket merely makes the unhealthy options the easiest ones, physically and psychologically.

That’s why the authors call product placement a “hidden risk factor” for the individual consumer. Their most intriguing suggestion, though, is that product placement could instead be a sort of hidden reward factor, if it were used to promote and give prominence to healthy foods and relegate the snack, dessert and junk fare to the sides and rear. Impulse marketing could just as easily make the most nutritional choices the handiest and most attractive ones. When two-thirds of us are overweight and one-third obese, almost anything that might in some way help lower those numbers should be given serious consideration.

But it won’t, of course. First, because the supermarkets would never rearrange their interior landscape to emphasize health above revenues. And second, because the idea of imposing such regulations would be viewed as career suicide by almost every politician in a position to propose it. The tide against “government trying to run our lives and limit our choices and tell us what to do” is running high and strong these days, and “regulation” has become an epithet for a lot of people who forget that savvy marketing also effectively limits our choices, and that a world without regulations is a world divided into predators and prey, especially when it comes to commerce and marketing.

And even if there were a widespread sentiment favoring such “healthy marketing” rules, it would bounce harmlessly off the economic armor of the sugar and dairy and other food industry lobbyists who would write whatever checks might be required to keep “product placement laws” in the sheer fantasy category.

The fact that the authors’ proposal is at present politically DOA doesn’t mean that it will stay that way, and a generation from now we may be wondering why we didn’t jump on the concept of healthy product placement when it was first suggested. Until then, avoid the aisle-end displays.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

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Impulse Marketing: How Supermarkets Help Make Us Fat is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/11/08/impulse-marketing-how-supermarkets-help-make-us-fat/

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