healthpolitics: jayparkinsonmd: ...

jayparkinsonmd:

redesignrelated:

Crispin Porter + Bogusky gives baby carrots the junk food treatment.

“…Just in time for the battle over what’s gonna be in millions of back-to-school lunches, Bolthouse Farms and nearly 50 other carrot growers today will unveil plans for the industry’s first-ever marketing campaign. The $25 million effort sets its sights on a giant, big-spending rival: junk food…”
—via USA Today

It’s about time.

This is pretty damn cool for a few reasons, but I want to draw your attention to one in particular because we’ve talked about it before: the irrationality of human behavioral choices.

A large portion of our decision-making when it comes to what foods we buy and what we feed our families is driven by irrational thought processes, things like habit (favoring products we’ve already tried over ones that we know to be the same or better), brand-recognition (subconsciously associating abstract qualities with the supplier), etc.

Junk food companies have known this for years, and so they spend billions on branding, advertising, and packaging. They realize that if they can make their product the shiniest item on the grocery shelf, our eyes will be drawn to it, and that large-print assurances that the junk we are buying is “LOW FAT!” (what does that even mean, really?) or “CERTIFIED ORGANIC!” will allow us to mollify our own rational guilt at buying it. They know that if they can drill their brand name into our heads well-enough, we will gravitate towards their items and baselessly eschew their competitors’.

Health-food producers are not as good at this. In fact, junk food producers are often better at convincing us their foods are health-foods than the producers of actual health-foods are. Just ask Pepsi about Vitamin Water. The public health enterprise, too, lags woefully behind in this area. It’s not really a surprise that a bunch of scientists, epidemiologists, and policy types wouldn’t be able to mobilize the hippest marketing around, but it’s also really great to see someone at least moving in that direction.

We need to stop talking to the aggregate populace like they’re the same people who read Health Affairs or JAMA. Although, to be fair, even the most educated readership buys into branding and media messaging all the time. It’s a very human behavior.

We need to be unafraid to be manipulative. I know that doesn’t sound great, but it’s true. We need to trick, tax, and tease the American populace into taking better care of itself. Because that’s what the junk-shillers are doing, and it works. Really, really well.