Marketing Nutrition

Hardly a week goes by without a report of how some common food helps the human body fend off a disease or succumb to one. Although encouraging people to eat more nutritiously can encourage better health, most efforts by companies, health professionals, and even parents are disappointingly ineffective. Misunderstanding consumers has lead to floundering sales for soy foods; embarrassing results for expensive Five-a-Day for Better Health programs, and uneaten mountains of vegetables at homes and in school cafeterias.The fact that nutrition is currently only centrally important to a small segment of the population points to a significant problem, particularly given the connection between diet and serious issues such as obesity, diabetes, strokes, and heart disease. Brian Wansink's Marketing Nutrition focuses on why people eat the foods they do, and what can be effectively and efficiently done to improve nutrition.The book's conclusions represent the combined findings of over thirty researchers and a series of twenty studies involving more than five thousand people on five continents. Wansink argues that the problem with nutrition is that it comes with a cost, often losing to competing considerations like price, convenience, habits, and taste. Wansink specifically shows how food fads, food perceptions and the psychology of various marketing segments can be leveraged to increase the consumption of functional foods. Additional chapters investigate de-marketing obesity, consumer reactions to food crises, and specific tools that can be used to understand consumer psychology to food.Wansink argues that the true challenge in marketing nutrition lies in leveraging new tools of consumer psychology (which he specifically demonstrates) and by applying lessons from the failures and successes of others. The same tools and insights that have helped make less nutritious products popular also offer the best opportunity to bring people back to a nutritious lifestyle. The key problem with marketing nutrition remains, after all, marketing.

Brian Wansink is professor of applied economics of marketing and of nutritional science at Cornell University. He is the director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.